Project Tango dances onto the scene. 

Say hello to Project Tango, the newest brainchild from Google. According to The Verge, Google has created an Android smartphone prototype that “will learn the dimension of the rooms and spaces just by being moved around inside of them.” Google is reaching out to professional developers to take the technology a step further.

According to Google’s Johnny Lee and the ATAP-Project Tango Team, Google has been working in conjunction with different research facilities, universities, and “industrial partners, over nine countries for the past year. The company has been collecting research from “the last decade of work in robotics and computer vision, concentrating that technology into a unique mobile phone.”

The 3D mapping technology is allowed by sensors in the phone which make “over a quarter million 3D measurements every second, updating its position and orientation in real time.”

Essentially, Project Tango aims to give a human-type understanding, in terms of “space and motion,” to mobile devices. As stated by Google, “we are physical beings that live in a 3D world. Yet, our mobile devices assume that physical world ends at the boundaries of the screen.”

So what’s the real world application? Google has answered that as well, and as expected.

“What if you could capture the dimensions of your home simply by walking around with your phone before you went furniture shopping? What if you never again found yourself lost in a new building?”

It seems the possibilities are endless, so how can people get their hands on them? Well, it’s important to remember that Project Tango is still in the prototype phase.

Google is targeting developers to add forward momentum to the technology with fresh ideas and the creation of phenomenal user experience. Of the 200 prototype dev kits available, Google has already allocated units “for projects in the areas of indoor navigation/mapping, single/multiplayer games that use physical space, and new algorithms for processing sensor data.” But in addition, Google has set aside units for possible future applications that the company hasn’t considered yet. That’s where the developers come in with those new ideas.

Hopefully they’re up for the challenge. Google expects distribution to begin by March 14 of this year.

For more visual information on Project Tango, watch this video from the team at Google.