Google’s Project Tango will be shut down on March 1, 2018 as the company turns their attention, and that of developers, to the software-only ARCore. The news came from the Project Tango Twitter account where the Google team behind it thanked developers for their work over the past three years on the hardware-software Augmented Reality solution.
We’re turning down support for Tango on March 1, 2018. Thank you to our incredible community of developers who made such progress with Tango over the last three years. We look forward to continuing the journey with you on ARCore. https://t.co/aYiSUkgyie
— Tango (@projecttango) December 15, 2017
The news should not be shocking at this point for developers or consumers for that matter. Google has been clear over the course of 2017 that ARCore, which is now in Developer Preview 2, will be the company’s AR solution going forward. It has a lot of benefits including being hardware independent.
Project Tango, at the time of its development, was pretty impressive. It combined specific hardware solutions, like Lenovo’s Phab2 phone, with software to create the AR environment. Functionally, ARCore is roughly equivalent to Tango but doesn’t require the specialized hardware. That’s a big deal because it means that we consumers can get an AR experience on any phone – in theory at least.
If you are one of the very few who actually own a Project Tango device, the news for you is that you won’t be seeing any more updates from a AR perspective on that device after March 2018.
