Google’s Project Tango is a 3-D tablet to help it compete with Amazon

Google has revealed that is working on a tablet computer with 3-D and motion-sensing capabilities, an effort dubbed Project Tango.

"The goal of Project Tango is to give mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion," team member Johnny Lee said on Thursday at a website devoted to the endeavour.

"Our team has been working with universities, research labs, and industrial partners spanning nine countries around the world to build on the last decade of research in robotics and computer vision, concentrating that technology into a unique mobile device," he said.

The curtain on the project was pulled back as Google put out word it would soon put prototypes, powered by Nvidia chips, in the hands of developers interested in creating applications that take advantage of innovations built into devices.

The development kits can be used to make "apps" that track full 3-D motion and recognise surfaces of things nearby, according to Google.