project tango / arcore area mapping

Question

As we know, ARCore has all but replaced project tango but I have some research projects in mind that involve area mapping, therefore I have few questions regarding tango and ARCore.

1. For Area mapping, tango produces more precise and denser point-cloud information than ARCore, therefore if I want to "area-map", a Tango device would be better for me. Is this right?
2. The SDK for ARCore and Tango are the same thing and therefore support for its methods, documentation etc. are still effectively available for Tango with the ARCore SDK?
3. I don't yet have an ARCore or Tango device (although I played around with Tango a bit a few years ago), so if the Tango SDK is different, where do I get it now there is no Tango support page?
4. Am thinking of getting a Zenfone AR for my Tango project. Any reason why not?

Answer 1

1. A Tango would be better as it has area recognition (recall). You can plot an area using the Tango, save as an .adf and then reload that using Area Learning. ARCore has a Visual Positioning Service in beta, which sounds very similar to Area Learning, but it has been in development for well over a year.
2. The SDK's share similarities, but are different.
3. You can find the archive SDK if you google "Tango Examples", here is the Unity one https://github.com/googlearchive/tango-examples-unity
4. ZenPhone AR is your best bet as it is the only device to support both ARCore and Tango. So you have the flexibility to switch around if needed.

Good luck with your research. As others have said Tango still has it's uses, but doesn't really have any commercial support anymore. I'm still using it though.

Answer 2

What is your project trying to do? I think there are only a few specific use cases left for tango.

If you want customers to download an app, you won't get that with tango - no-one uses the devices.

If you are using the kit for a booth/art exhibit/etc.. where you own and let people use a device, it can be a useful cheap way of doing handheld AR. But there are other stronger methods for working with depth data in a lot of those cases. And lots of optical options can achieve similar results too.

So essentially, use ARCore if that is at all an option for your project.