Nvidia’s Tegra K1 comes to the US in Google’s 3D depth-sensing Tango tablet

The first device powered by Nvidia’s new Tegra K1 SoC to hit the US will be Google’s Tango tablet devkit. The K1 is notable for being the first mobile SoC to include a “desktop-class” GPU (a cut-down 192-core Kepler). The Tango tablet follows on from the Tango smartphone, which Google showed off back in February. The first K1-powered tablet, when it arrives later this year (probably soon), will set you back a grand total of $1024 — but that’s a small price to pay for a mobile walk-around device with advanced 3D sensing and mapping capabilities.

In case you missed it back in February, Tango is the latest creation of Google’s (inherited from Motorola) Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group. ATAP is mostly famous for its Project Ara modular smartphone, which it showed off a few months before Tango. Tango is essentially a smartphone with built-in forward-facing Kinect, and a few other fancy sensors to boot. These sensors collect a huge amount of data, which Google can then do some crazy things with — like creating a detailed 3D map of your home, using computer vision to guide you to an exact location inside a supermarket, etc.

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