Google have announced Project Tango, an experimental smartphone platform dedicated to mobile 3D mapping, which comes out of Motorola’s former Advanced Technology and Platforms (ATAP) group. It map 3D space like Microsoft’s Kinect except squeezed down into a smartphone.
“We are physical beings that live in a 3D world,” wrote Google’s Johnny Lee, the head of the Tango Project team. “Yet our mobile devices assume that physical world ends at the boundaries of the screen.
The goal of Project Tango is to give mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion.” This type of technology would be perfect for retail who, with in store navigation technology, would be able to direct customers to products that are relevant to them and on offer.
The 3D would help direct customers to the specific shelf a product can be located. It might also solve the barrier to implementing in store navigation at the moment – the investment in hardware required to enable indoor mapping. With 3D navigation, the technology could create a point of reference when the customer entered the store and relate to that as the customer continued to navigate the store.
