Qualcomm And Google Hit Augmented Reality Dance Floor With Project Tango Smartphone

At Google's I/O conference, held late this week, Qualcomm announced that the next-generation Project Tango platform is going to sport its Snapdragon 810 processor, which packs in the very capable Adreno 430 GPU.

As we've covered before, Project Tango is Google's upcoming smartphone and tablet platform that revolves around using the device for 3D purposes. With it, you could capture and turn the environment around you into a 3D model, something that multiple cameras and infrared sensors would help with.

With its Snapdragon 810 processor, Qualcomm says that it will allow Project Tango to deliver great real-world 3D gaming experiences, indoor navigation (this one in particular seems hugely interesting), as well as virtual and augmented reality experiences.

The Adreno 430 GPU packed into the Snapdragon 810 is designed to offer great gaming and compute performance while remaining very power efficient. Some of the features it boasts are camera image and video post-processing, tessellation, geometry shaders and programmable blending, and also the peculiar "advanced GPU security for secure composition and management of premium video and other multimedia."

Developers interested in this upcoming iteration of Tango can register their interest. When the time comes that devkits are available, Qualcomm will reach out and hook you up. It seems fairly likely that these upgraded kits would cost similarly to the current one, at around $512.