I'm setting up an arena for an autonomous mobile robot with a tango tablet mounted to it. The tablet is mounted ~2ft off the ground and a large part of its view will be the arena walls.
My questions is whether I should paint the arena walls a matte color because it seems like the depth sensor prefers matte, or should I paint a bunch of unique designs on the walls so that it can track feature points for area learning.
Tango uses a time of flight sensor for range imaging. I would absolutely recommend using matte colours.
Try out different paints and use the one that yields the best results. You can still have feature marks on your walls.
Keep your features small so you can easily average them out in case they disturb your range data.