What is the future of Tango in relation to ARCore?

Question

Specifically can we expect these APIs to be seperate for the forseeable future?

If not any rough idea about timelines when and how they might be combined?

ps. The arcore tag has not been created yet

Answer 1

I have been researching this lately, and all I have gathered is that there is no real indication that these two APIs will be working together.

I personally wouldn't count on it since they were created by two different groups: Tango was created by Google's skunkworks ATAP group, whereas ARCore is developed by the Android and VR teams. Furthermore, according to Google, ARCore was built on Tango technology:

We’ve been developing the fundamental technologies that power mobile AR over the last three years with Tango, and ARCore is built on that work. But, it works without any additional hardware, which means it can scale across the Android ecosystem.

So, overall it looks like it is intended to be a standalone API that learned from Tango's mistakes.

Besides, it has a very a similar functionality; the main difference being the lack of depth data gathered from the IR sensor present in Tango devices. This is what worried me most, but I see that despite this, ARCore is still capable of obtaining point clouds. I'm not entirely sure how (structure from motion, perhaps?) and have yet to see how they look, but it's promising for those who used Tango for 3D reconstruction.

Needless to say, this is all speculation based on articles I have read and the way the ARCore API currently looks. Hopefully we'll know more soon!

Answer 2

from what i have read today, there is no future for "tango" as we know it today. every ar development is now channeled into arcore. i also read that for the time being tango devices are not supported by arcore. so it sounds like tango devices will behave mostly as any other android device when arcore is released to devices other than pixel & s8. google states the wider release is this winter, whatever that means.