iFixit has taken a look inside Google’s Project Tango

Have you been wondering what makes Google’s 3D mapping Project Tango tablet tick? The tinkerers at iFixit have managed to get their hands on the device and performed a little exploratory surgery on the device in the name of science. According to the DIY repair site, some of Project Tango’s entrails resemble Microsoft’s Kinect motion tracker, which kind of makes sense. There’s also a 4-megapixel IR rear-facing camera, a custom dual-cell 2,480mAh battery and a NVIDIA Tegra K1 processor helping things along.

Project Tango is a project run by Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group (ATAP), formerly a division of Motorola. The new tablet joins a smartphone as a device that features sensors to track the 3D motion of the device and build up a 3D model of the environment it is in. According to Google, the goal of Project Tango is to “give mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion.” A tablet is the latest Project Tango device to be unveiled, and the folks at iFixit got their hands on one to take to pieces. Note that this tablet is not a commercial device, instead a limited edition development kit “professional developers interested in exploring the future of mobile 3D sensing.” The spec is quite impressive, with the tablet featuring a 7-inch HD 1920 by 1200 (323 pixels-per-inch) touchscreen display, a 2.3 GHz Quad-core NVIDIA Tegra K1 processor (same silicon as found in Nvidia’s SHIELD tablet), 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage that’s expandable thanks to a built-in microSD card slot. On the connectivity front it features wi-fi, Bluetooth LE and 4G LTE.