New Google Mobile Device Creates 3D Maps

“Most mobile devices today assume that the physical world ends at the boundaries of the screen,” says Johhny Lee, project lead at ATAP, in a YouTube video introducing Project Tango.

The goal of the Project Tango device, however, “is to give mobile devices a human scale understanding of space and motion,” says Lee.

Rodrigo Caula describes the technology in a designboom article, providing ample evidence of why this technology might be so important to planners and designers of the built environment: “the built-in sensors allow the phone to make over a quarter million three-dimensional measurements every second, updating its position and orientation in real-time, combining that data into a single 3D map of the space around you.”