Google to shut down Tango; shifting focus to ARCore

Tech giant Google on Saturday announced the shutting down of its high-end smartphone augmented reality platform, Tango.

The company instead wants to shift focus to its mass market product, ARCore.

According to TechCrunch, Tango support will cease March 1, 2018.

"Thank you to our incredible community of developers who made such progress with Tango over the last three years," Google said in a tweet.

"We look forward to continuing the journey with you on ARCore," it added.

Introduced in 2014, Tango relied on advanced camera hardware to build 3D meshes of spaces in a manner which was similar to the way HoloLens from Microsoft functions.

Further, it was difficult for Google to get phone manufacturers to build this fairly expensive functionality into their products, and it only succeeded in getting the Tango platform running on a few gimmicky devices.

The company also seemed to have its hand forced this year by rival company Apple, which talked of a big game regarding its ARKit platform on iOS11.

This move left Google to abandon the high cost of entry to Android AR with the introduction of ARCore this past August.

However, Google with Pixel and Pixel 2 brought the system in the form of augmented reality stickers; opening AR features to more people instead of Tango, which is likely to have reached in its lifetime.