Google will soon begin shipping a prototype phone capable of mapping, in three dimensions, the world around us. It’s part of the company’s aggressively experimental effort called Project Tango, as Jacob Kastrenekas of The Verge reports:

It’s an ambitious project, but that should be no surprise given who it’s coming from: Tango comes out of the Advanced Technology and Projects group — one of the few pieces of Motorola that Google has opted to hang on to rather than sell. “The goal of Project Tango is to give mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion,” says Johnny Lee, leader of Project Tango. Google has 200 devices that it’s preparing to give out to developers who want to build mapping tools, games, and new algorithms that take advantage of the phone’s sensors, and it expects to send them all out by March 14th.

In a video released by Google, Lee explains the thinking behind creating a phone capable of taking in real-time spatial data: “We are physical beings in a 3D world, yet mobile devices today assume that the physical world ends at the boundaries of the screen.” These new gadgets, according to the company, are capable of recording a quarter-million measurements, which is a fair mimicking of how we humans move through spaces.

Google is under pressure from the open source mapping world. OpenStreetMap, for instance, has become a viable competitor, having grown from one man’s desire to map his corner of England to a robust solution that forms the base layer for everything from the maps on Craigslist to, in some parts of the world, Apple Maps. If you’re Google, there’s much to like in Project Tango. For one thing, it makes use of the fact that Google is doing rather well when it comes to mobile devices. While Project Tango “is not part of Android today,” it doesn’t hurt that the company also has the world’s most popular mobile platform under its roof, not to mention the capacity to tinker with hardware custom designed to do mapping more advanced than elsewhere.

But what is a self-mapping phone good for?

Google’s video quotes Chris Anderson, formerly of Wired and now CEO of 3D Robotics. “We have a problem called navigation indoors,” Anderson says. “It is a solution to that problem.” Indeed, the clip talks about turning your living room into a video game, but that seems like a placeholder idea. Perhaps more intriguing is what 3D mapping might mean for shared spaces beyond the question posed by Google: “What if directions to a new location didn’t stop at the street address?” That isn’t hugely exciting, but you can imagine a device that might allow developers and writers to co-create “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style city tours using this gizmo — ones that the rest of us experience either through our phones or, heck, through Google Glass. You likely have better ideas. Feel free to leave them in the comments below.

Another developer in the film has a rather lovely turn of phrase to describe what’s being worked on here: “It’s this ability to follow in one another’s footsteps.”

Here’s Google’s video introducing Project Tango:

Nancy Scola is a Washington, DC-based journalist whose work tends to focus on the intersections of technology, politics, and public policy. Shortly after returning from Havana she started as a tech reporter at POLITICO.