Google shuts down Project Tango in favor of ARCore

Google is shutting down its high-end smartphone augmented reality platform, Tango, in order to focus on the more mass market ARCore product. Support for Tango will come to an end on March 31, 2018.

We’re turning down support for Tango on March 1, 2018. Thank you to our incredible community of developers who made such progress with Tango over the last three years. We look forward to continuing the journey with you on ARCore. https://t.co/aYiSUkgyie

— Tango (@projecttango) December 15, 2017

When Project Tango first debuted, it was intended to bring augmented reality experiences to smartphones, however it required that hardware include several specific motion sensors and a depth-sensing IR camera. This made Tango support expensive for manufacturers to implement.

Meanwhile, Google introduced ARCore, a developer toolkit for creating augmented reality apps and experiences, back in August. ARCore still won't work with any phone, but it will have a much broader reach than Tango. Google said at launch that ARCore will work on up to 100 million devices by the end of the year, and that most Android phones released in 2018 would work with the service too.

So, Project Tango's demise was pretty much expected. While it’s an unfortunate move for anyone who bought the Asus ZenFone AR, hopefully Tango’s retirement will mean extra movement on ARCore development — and an increase in AR content as a whole.