According to Dugan,[1] the ideal ATAP project combines technology and science, requires a certain amount of novel research, and creates a marketable product.

Another is to make use of resources outside the organizational box; ATAP has worked with hundreds of partners in more than twenty countries, including schools, corporations, startups, governments, and nonprofits.

Standing contracts are in place with a number of top-flight schools, such as Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, and Caltech, to facilitate rapid research arrangements when needed.

Project Tango was a computer-vision technology that allows mobile devices to detect their position relative to the world around them, without requiring GPS or other external signals.

This enables the use of mobile phones and tablets for indoor navigation, 3D mapping, measurement of physical spaces, recognition of known environments, augmented reality, and windows into virtual 3D worlds.

With Project Ara, consumers would populate an electronic frame, called an endoskeleton or "endo", with rectangular hardware modules for power, processing, memory, screen, wireless, and other functionality.

ATAP sponsored Project Ara Developer's Conferences in 2014 and 2015 to begin stimulating interest in the emerging hardware ecosystem and solicit input from potential designers and manufacturers.

However, at the time of the extension team leader Paul Eremenko was replaced by Rafa Camargo,[8] named by CNET in 2015 as one of the Top 20 Latinos in Tech.

This novel approach, which uses small, high-speed sensors and data-analysis techniques such as Doppler, can detect fine motions with sub-millimeter accuracy.

[12] Thus, for instance, Project Soli technology enables a user to issue commands to a computer by rubbing a thumb and forefinger together in pre-defined patterns.

The project is headed by Ivan Poupyrev,[13] a former scientist for Disney Imagineering who was named one of Fast Company's "100 Most Creative People in Business 2013".

The platform encompasses techniques for creating fashion fabrics with conductive fibers woven into them, plus small, flexible computing components and feedback devices (such as haptics or LEDs), along with software APIs that applications can use to exchange data with the garment.