An Irish company is teaming up with Google to work on the next generation of smart phones that run on Android technology.

Dublin-based Movidius designs chips and employs 50 people in Europe and the US. Now Google is going to use their technology to work on 'visual awareness' for new phones.

'Project Tango' is an Android-based smartphone development kit within Google's Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group.

"Project Tango strives to give mobile devices a human-like understanding of space and motion through advanced sensor fusion and computer vision, enabling new and enhanced types of user experiences - including 3D scanning, indoor navigation and immersive gaming" said Johnny Lee, Technical Program Lead of ATAP at Google.

"Movidius has provided a key component towards enabling access to these features in a small mobile platform with a chip designed with visual sensing and battery life in mind".

"We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Movidius as these new applications evolve and new device designs come to market" he added.

Remi El-Ouazzane, CEO of Movidius, says "Google has paved the future direction for smart mobile vision systems and we're excited to be working with a company that shares our vision to usher in the next wave of applications that fundamentally alter how a mobile device is used to experience the world around us".

Newstalk's Business Editor Ian Guider explains the plan.