CODEWITHSUNDEEP
google-project-tangorotational-matrices
jskeezy
jskeezy

Reputation: 3

Does Project Tango utilize the Android SDK?

I'm developing an app that uses device sensors to determine user x-axis rotations and y-axis pitch (essentially the user spins in a circle and looks up at the sky or down at the ground). I've developed this app for a phone using the android Sensor.getRotationMatrix and Sensor.getOrientation functions and then using the first two resulting orientation values. I've now moved my app to a Project Tango tablet and these values no longer seem to be valid. I've looked into PT a bit and it seems that this measures things in Quarternions. Does this mean that Project Tango is not meant to implement the Android SDK?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 98

Answers (2)

Matthew
Matthew

Reputation: 841

The Project Tango APIs (which are for Android only) and the Android SDK are both required to build Project Tango apps. The Tango APIs offer higher level interfaces to Android device sensors than the Android SDK's direct access to sensors state - Tango APIs combine sensors states to deliver more complete "pose" (6 degrees of freedom position and orientation) state, as well as 3D (X, Y, depth) scene points and even feature recognition in scenes, etc. The crucial benefit of the Tango APIs is syncing several different sensors very precisely in realtime so the pose state is very accurate; indeed, the latest Tango devices support that sync inside the CPU circuitry itself. An app collecting that data from sensors using the (non-Tango) Android SDK APIs will not be fast enough to correlate the sensors as through the Tango APIs. So perhaps you're getting sensor data that's not synced, which sows as offsets.

Also, a known bug in the Tango APIs is that the device's compass sensor is returning garbage values. I don't know if that bug affects the quality of data returned by the Android SDK's calls directly to the compass. But the Android SDK's calls to the compass are going to return state at least somewhat out of sync with the state returned by the Tango API calls.

Upvotes: 1

Daniel GL
Daniel GL

Reputation: 1249

In theory, the Android SDK should still be working, so your app should work without any change, but it won't get advantage of the improvements given by the Project Tango. To get the advantages of Tango (fisheye camera for improved motion tracking...), you need to use the Tango API to activate the Tango Service and then yes, use the pose in quaternions.

Upvotes: 0

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