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So, then, what is Google's Tango, and why should you care? Released at the end of the year in a large phone called the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro that most people will probably never be aware of, Tango is an advanced type of next-generation camera tech for phones. It's basically an array of cameras that enables depth sensing in 3D. I've been using the Phab 2 Pro for several weeks, along with its assortment of launch apps. The phone itself isn't great. For a variety of reasons -- an older version of Android, no NFC, and the fact that it's just downright huge -- you shouldn't buy it.

But as the first Tango phone that's available at retail, it's still a big deal -- even if AR is still a niche technology, Here's why, Consider this a peek at what you can expect from more phones starting next year, An infrared camera, wide-angle camera, and additional RGB camera track the immediate environment and can map 3D space, and also sense the edges of objects, In a virtual shopping app from Lowe's, I put a lamp on my floor, and an end table, and a big cozy armchair, I could walk around them, and they'd herringbone black on cream iphone case stay in place where they were supposed to be, You can do similar things with a standard phone camera, but they don't stay in place as persistently..

Virtual lamp. The most amazing thing you can do with Tango is whole-room 3D scanning. The Matterport app slowly scans everything around within a certain radius..slowly, as if painting in the world in many colored dots. The scans are time-consuming and take up a lot of storage, but when I was done I had a fuzzy but 3D model of my office, or the NJ Transit train, or my bedroom. I could spin around and zoom in on details, or even measure distances in that scanned space with a built-in tool. Tango can track larger spaces and fit together details scanned in piecemeal. Google is planning on using some of these ideas to create 3D indoor maps.

Objects don't rest in your hand, so forget about that fantasy, Tango is finicky, It's a lot like an Xbox Kinect camera, shrunken down and put on a phone, It can only sense a certain distance, so far-off things down a hallway won't get measured..or even things all the way across a room, And it can't start tracking until something's at least a foot or two away, Lighting conditions can't be too dim, herringbone black on cream iphone case either, I wasn't able to make AR dominoes appear on a book held on my lap..I needed to stand back and paint them on a table or floor..

Apple's dual-camera Portrait mode on the iPhone 7 Plus has similar types of restrictions: I needed to line up my shots just right. This could end up being a defining trait of more advanced phone 3D AR cameras. Measuring things works really well..and is hard to figure out. The interfaces for many Tango AR apps I tried weren't intuitive. That's bad design, but it also suggests the challenges in explaining what a depth-sensing 3D camera means for using camera tools. In Lenovo's Measure app, which cleverly acts like a 3D measuring tape for your space, it took me a while to understand how to begin and end measurements. Many apps are exploring 3D content, but with a 2D screen and touch controls.