This is a view of the solar system using technology Google calls “Project Tango” that uses software to track motion and size up the contour of a room.

SAN FRANCISCO — Suppose your smart phone is clever enough to grasp your physical surroundings — the room’s size, the location of doors and windows and the presence of other people. What could it do with that info?

We’re about to get our first look. Today, Lenovo will give consumers their first chance to buy a phone featuring Google’s 3-year-old Project Tango, an attempt to imbue machines with a better understanding about what’s around them.

Location tracking through GPS and cell towers tells apps where you are, but not much more. Tango uses software and sensors to track motions and size up the contours of rooms, empowering Lenovo’s new phone to map building interiors. That’s a crucial building block of a promising new frontier in “augmented reality,” or the digital projection of lifelike images and data into a real-life environment.

If Tango fulfills its promise, furniture shoppers will be able to download digital models of couches, chairs and coffee tables to see how they would look in their actual living rooms.

Tango will be able to create internal maps of homes and offices on the fly. Google won’t need to build a mapping database ahead of time, as it does with existing services like Google Maps and Street View. Nonetheless, Tango could raise fresh concerns about privacy.

The efforts come as phone sales are slowing. People have been holding off on upgrades, partly because they haven’t gotten excited about the types of technological advances hitting the market during the past few years. Phones offering intriguing new technology could help spur more sales.

Both large and small tech companies are betting that augmented realty, or AR, will take off sooner than later. Microsoft has been selling a $3,000 prototype of its HoloLens AR headset.