Google Unveils Project Tango 3D Mapping Tablet DevKit Powered By NVIDIA's Tegra K1

Google's Project Tango Tablet development kit is a 3D mapping and spatially-aware device that, with a number of cameras and sensors on board, can detect its surroundings and your movements in three dimensions. As such, you can utilize the device to develop applications and uses that integrate the physical world around you in a virtual representation on screen.  From augmented reality, to gaming and terrain mapping, the things you could conceivably do with a device like this are rather fascinating.

Maybe you're a gamer and you're either a Call of Duty, Battlefield or Titanfall fanatic but you've played every map in the deck and it's getting a little stale.  Well, with a device like Google's Project Tango, you could map your entire neighborhood for a home town smack-down frag fest with your buds in very familiar (and fun to shoot up!) territory but one you have yet to lay down the lead on.

And real estate agents looking to expose clients to new properties with greater efficiency?  Well, you get the idea...

Until today, we haven't gotten a lot of detail regarding exactly what makes Project Tango tick but the folks at NVIDIA have helped, along with Google, to let the cat out of the proverbial bag. It appears that the just announced Project Tango development kit is based on a 7-inch Android tablet with 4GB of RAM, 128GB of storage and it's powered by none other than NVIDIA's new Tegra K1 integrated processor and SoC (System On a Chip).  Interestingly, previous versions of Project Tango have been torn down, revealing a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 under the hood.  However, it appears Google needed a bit more juice and is also going with NVIDIA's new low power mobile beast. 

And low and behold, here's what an NVIDIA Tegra K1 Project Tango tablet looks like...
NVIDIA, Google Project Tango Development Tablet

This Google-NVIDIA joint development effort employs NVIDIA's potent quad-core ARM A15 design with its 192-core NVIDIA Kepler graphics engine for serious graphics and CUDA/OpenCL computational muscle. 

NVIDIA Tegra K1 System On a Chip
NVIDIA Tegra K1 SoC

The device will also support OpenGL 4.4 for console quality graphics but in the palm of your hand in 7-inch tablet form factor.  Pretty cool stuff.



Word is Google's Project Tango Developer's Kit will be available "later this year" and will cost exactly $1024. Wouldn't you know it, that price fits neatly into a 1KB memory space.  Think they meant to do that?  We hope to get a Project Tango tablet in here for preview and showcase in the months ahead, so stay tuned!