Kinect in a smartphone: Google’s moonshot Project Tango torn down

And the answers did not have to wait long. iFixit found a lot of interesting stuff under the hood. First, the Movidius Myriad 1 co-processor (the main system chip is the Snapdragon 800), a tailor-made chip that makes the fast and accurate location scanning of Project Tango possible. Movidius CEO claims that this chip could lie in the foundation of a future vision processing unit, much like we have a CPU and a GPU right now, but we’re yet to see about that.

It is not just that chip, though. The cameras are another crucial component that makes Project Tango the unique location-scanning device that it is. Interestingly, iFixit fount out that what looks like a regular 4-megapixel OmniVision camera on it, turns out to be a sensor capable of detecting both RGB and infra-red (IR) light. It is this capability to detect IR light that allows for depth perception. How? A powerful (for a smartphone) array of LEDs beams IR light in the form of a grid of dots. The size of those dots differs depending on how close (small dot) or how far (larger dot) an object is. The sensor in Tango’s camera then captures light information from those dots, and measures the size differences between them to come up with a depth map. This whole process is eerily similar to the one Microsoft uses in its Kinect. You can actually see that projected IR grid in the breath-taking image above.

Finally, what this teardown reveals is just how easy a device is to repair. Luckily, in designing this technological new-comer, Google made sure it's a device that is easy to tear down and replace parts on, which is great. Tango scored 9 out of 10 in iFixit's repairibility rankings. 

Take a look at the step-by-step teardown below, but don't forget that as awesome as it all looks, Tango is not yet available for end-users. Only select developers can get it. Worry not, though - if the stars align right, such technology could arrive in smartphones in the not so distant future.

source: iFixit