Google's Project Tango Comes To Life In New 3D Mapping Phone From Lenovo

It’s hard to make phones interesting these days. New features rarely get more exciting than a faster processor, sharper display and slightly better battery life. It's simply not enough to convince people to upgrade the hardware as quickly as they once were, and that's hitting the entire mobile industry hard.

Hoping to buck that trend, Lenovo is introducing the Phab2 Pro, the world's first phone equipped with Google's depth-sensing technology called Project Tango. The 6.4-inch phone comes equipped with a number of cameras and sensors that can map out an environment in 3D. Google and Lenovo said the phone will capture more than 250,000 measurements a second.

(Also read: Lenovo's Moto Bets On 'Modular' Smartphone System)

First announced at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, the Phab2 Pro has an all metal aluminum body and  Qualcomm ’s Snapdragon 652 “system on a chip” — interestingly not Qualcomm’s premium chip, the Snapdragon 820. It has 4 gigabytes of memory and a display with 2,560 x 1,440 resolution. For the Project Tango capabilities, the phone has two 16-megapixel cameras on the back as well as depth sensors and motion tracking.

The new phone will cost $499 and will be globally available in September. (Lenovo is also launching the Phab2 Plus for $299 without the Project Tango features, but with the same dual camera system for improved photography.)

The Project Tango feature will work with a number of new augmented reality apps that place digital objects in the user's environment. A Protect Tango tutorial will run the user through all its capabilities. Google is also offering a discovery app for finding other apps that are built specifically for Project Tango. The phone isn’t well-suited for virtual reality, however.

"The phone is not that great for VR applications in its current form," said Johnny Lee, director of engineering of Project Tango at Google, in an interview. "The phone is better for AR or handheld VR experiences."

One app that will be ready at launch is a simple tape measuring tool built by Google. The user can pull up the app, click on surfaces in the environment and get rough visual measurements of the space. There will also be Project Tango games at launch, such as an action shooter that places enemies in the world as well as a virtual pet game where a virtual dog can follow you around. Most of these apps were developed by third party developers that Google worked with.

Google and Lenovo are also thinking about how a Project Tango phone could be used for remodeling homes. Because the phone can get rough measurements of the environment, users could digitally place furniture and other home furnishings to get an idea of how it would look in their home. Lowe’s will be introducing an app that does just this.

Apple is rumored to also be introducing depth-mapping capabilities in an upcoming version of its iPhone using a dual camera setup. The addition of the second camera will also boost the iPhone's camera performance.

Project Tango began three years ago and seemed destined for Google's heap of fascinating hardware projects that never seem to make it off the ground. Over the past few years, chip makers Qualcomm and Intel offered reference designs for building Project Tango phones, but received seemingly little interest from device makers in building real products.

Google and Lenovo have been working on the Phab2 Pro since early 2015 and equipping a phone with all the extra cameras and sensors wasn’t easy, said Jeff Meredith, a vice president and general manager of Lenovo’s phone business, in an interview. Issues with overheating and battery consumption plagued the project. But the two companies pushed ahead.

“We were immediately excited about Tango as a technology that could truly become pervasive,” Meredith said. “We don’t see it as something to be in a small subset of smartphones, but something that can become mainstream and integrate into our lives.”

For now, Meredith thinks the Phab2 Pro will be limited to early adopters. But eventually, Lenovo is working on bringing Project Tango capabilities to future devices.

"We view this as version one," Meredith said. "This is part of a long-term journey to integrate Tango into an array of different devices. We see Tango as something that can be as pervasive as GPS in your phone."