Google Tango Dev Contest Includes AR/VR Track and $95,000 in Prize Money

Project Tango is Google’s computer vision initiative that seeks to equip consumer devices with consistent and useful environmental tracking capabilities. Google thinks that the platform could be useful for virtual and augmented reality too, and is encouraging developers to start experimenting by adding an AR/VR track to the Project Tango dev contest.

Project Tango technical lead Johnny Lee announced the development contest during his Tango update presentation at Google I/O 2015 last week. Each of the three tracks in the contest—Utility, AR/VR, and Entertainment—will see the following seed money broken into three qualifying rounds:

• $1,024 – 16 selected proposals
• $2,048 – 4 selected working prototypes
• $4,096 – 1 selected final app

Finally, there will be one contest-wide grand prize winner that will receive $8,192. So, assuming you take home the grand prize, you’ll walk away with $15,360 in total. Google says the total cash value up for grabs across all tracks is $95,000 and Lee noted that he hopes it “won’t be the last contest we run.”

Project Tango Developer Contest

Entries in the Tango developer contest opened as of the contest’s announcement last week. Key dates for the contest include:

• Proposal Entry Deadline: June 25th
• Final APK Entry: September 23rd

Full contest rules can be found here, including a more detailed breakdown of the contest’s timeline. The grand prize winner will be announced in October.

Although Lee called Project Tango “interesting” for virtual reality, he admitted that the current table development kit wasn’t optimized for it, saying that “…these tablets were not designed for VR, they have high latency, they don’t have quite the right rendering stack, but from a sensor and tracking standpoint, they seem to be performing relatively well.” As the company becomes increasingly focused on virtual reality, however, it’s possible that we’ll see VR optimizations in the future.

See Also: Google Wants to Use Tango Tech for VR, But Admits Current Dev Kits Aren’t Optimized

A video from Google demonstrations the tablet’s positional tracking and mapping capabilities on scales that range from a room to a building to a city.

Prior to the contest’s announcement, the Tango Tablet Development Kit was available only on a select basis. However, the company has now opened the device up for sale to anyone interested in developing for the platform. The dev kit runs $512, which Lee called a “pretty aggressive price point” given the device’s specs.

Google’s ultimate goal is to see Project Tango technology in tablets and smartphones alike. To that end, the company announced a new reference device built on Snapdragon and made in partnership with Qualcomm. The smartphone-sized unit is packed with the sensors needed to bring Tango’s tracking tech to your pocket.

“So these MDP platforms are the reference designs provided to device manufacturers to accelerate the design of their next generation phones using Qualcomm chipsets,” Lee said, but warned that only a handful would be made and distributed to OEMs and the like. Presumably further down the road, the company will offer a Tango smartphone development kit similar to the reference design.