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Google's Project Tango is now just called Tango

Google's Project Tango is now just called Tango

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Lenovo just announced the Phab 2 Pro, which is the first consumer phone to feature Project Tango, Google's augmented reality technology. To commemorate that milestone, Google officially dropped "project" from the name and gave Tango a brand new logo. Both were announced onstage at Lenovo Tech World by Johnny Lee, the head engineer of Tango.

The new logo is an orange-and-yellow triangle with a three-dimensional cube inside. It's a nod to Tango's ability to map 3D space, and the new design is also more closely aligned with the logos for Google's other consumer products (like the Play Store or Play Music).

Are consumers ready for it?

Tango was born out of Google's Advanced Technology and Projects group, or ATAP, which has spawned other fantastic and experimental ideas such as Project Ara and Project Jacquard.

"We chose Project Tango to represent the highly experimental nature of the work," Lee said on stage. "It was an appropriate name as we iterated on the software and iterated on the hardware." But Lee said that Tango continues to be a "large investment" for Google, and noted that the Tango team has grown as a part of this investment. With that in mind, and considering that Lenovo will be shipping the Phab 2 Pro later this year, the team decided to change the name.

In that sense, the new name and logo are a sign of Tango's maturity. But it's still a home for a lot of Google's weirdest AR experiments, and the chance of consumers adopting a 6.4-inch Lenovo phablet on any sort of critical scale is low. That said, Tango has definitely come a very long way since we first got our hands on it, and much like some of its ATAP brethren, Google seems ready to let the project fly the experimental coop.