• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 5, 2016

A teaser advertisement from Lenovo and Google touts an announcement from the duo Thursday at CES, the computer electronics show organized by the Consumer Technology Association, formerly the Consumer Electronics Association or CEA.

The tagline -- “Mobile devices should see and navigate the world, the way we do” -- hints at a hardware announcement.

Project Tango, Google’s technology platform, understands space and motion. It uses computer vision such as 3D motion and tracking with the ability to sense depth to give mobile devices like smartphones and tablets the ability to detect the geographic position relative to the world around them without using GPS or other external signals.

Within a smartphone, the technology can map indoor spaces such as walls, ceilings and floors and orient the hardware to its surroundings to tell the distance between objects and the phone -- which typically is in the hand, purse or pocket of a consumer.

If the technology can identify the location from an object, it can more accurately target advertisements, for example. The technology comes out of the Google's Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group. The group focuses on research and development as part of the Motorola Mobility acquisition in 2014, the part of the company that didn’t go to Lenovo for approximately $2.91 billion.

Former Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) chief Regina Dugano heads ATAP, but former Microsoft Kinect team member Johnny Lee now leads the Tango project.