RIP Tango.

Google has announced it is shutting down Tango on 1 March 2018. The project was one of Google's first attempts at making augmented reality possible on mobile phones. It was introduced in 2014, then became available through developer kits, and eventually landed in some consumer devices last year, before sort of fizzling out. Then, in response to Apple, Google launched ARCore this past summer.

As you might've guessed, ARCore is Android’s version of Apple ARKit. It's a baked-in augmented reality platform that developers can leverage. It's different from Tango, which relies on custom hardware requirements. Sure, ARCore is less powerful than Tango, but that's okay. It's only meant to be more accessible. Google said it will work with 100 million existing and upcoming devices. You can learn more about it from here.

AR isn't a new technology. But major companies, like Google and Apple, are now embracing it, so everyone's talking about it. You see, while virtual reality immerses you into a space, replacing everything you see in a physical world, AR takes the world around you and adds virtual objects over it. With AR, for instance, you can look around a room with your's phone display and see, say, a Pokemon standing in front of you.

Google just brought ARCore to the Pixel and Pixel 2, so the writing has been on the wall for Tango. Now, Google is confirming what we already figured, by taking down the Tango website and Twitter account. It also said Tango “will not be supported by Google” next year.