Tango down: Google’s first AR project officially shuts down March 1

Ron Amadeo

Now that Google’s newest augmented reality project, ARCore, is out and functioning, the company is ready to admit that its old augmented reality project—Tango—is dead. Google took to Twitter today to announce that Tango support would be shut down on March 1, 2018.

Tango was Google’s first big augmented reality push, and it solved the problem of position tracking with lots and lots of extra hardware. Tango devices basically packed the entirety of an Xbox Kinect—an IR projector, a time-of-flight camera, and a fisheye motion camera—into the back of a smartphone. The extra sensors allowed the phone to see in full 3D, which was mostly used to bring consumers a small handful of augmented reality games. The first Project Tango device, the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro, was an expensive, slow, massive device with ugly looks and poor battery life. The second and last Tango phone to ever be released, the Asus ZenFone AR, improved on the hardware a bit, but by then the platform seemed dead.