Google’s Project Tango will enable cool augmented reality games (hands-on demo)

Larry Yang, a former member of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 hardware team, gave me a demo recently over at his new job at Google. Yang is the lead project manager for Project Tango, which equips a mobile device with 3D-sensing capabilities so that you can create games and other apps that are aware of their surroundings. He showed me a game that uses Tango, and it was like stepping into a future where games, 3D sensing, motion-sensing, cameras, and animated overlays all combine into a very cool augmented reality experience.

Project Tango is yet another way to create the feeling of AR, where you insert animated objects into a real 3D space that you can view via special glasses or a tablet’s screen. In our demo, we used a special tablet, but you could also use something like upcoming AR glasses. Augmented reality is expected to become a $120 billion market by 2020, according to tech advisor Digi-Capital. But first, companies such as Google have to build the platforms that make it possible. Google is demoing the technology this week at the 2016 International CES, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas.