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Image by Rob Schultz
Once again, I/O was held at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco, May 28 29. At ’s annual confab for third-party developers, engineers from across the world attended the show to hear about ’s latest products services. This year, revealed, among other services, Android y, a new way to purchase items in brick–mortar stores using Android smartphones; a developer preview of “M,” the next version of the Android operating system; Brillo, a new OS based on Android that controls devices in the home lets them talk to each other; a new photo sharing app called otos.
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ke previous years, I/O 2015 was held at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco.
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According to , roughly 5,600 people attended this year’s show, which was spread out among three levels of the Moscone Center. Various booths work stations, designed around geometric patterns, were set up throughout the show floor. The booths were devoted to ’s software tools for third party developers as well as futuristic projects like its Tango tablet for 3D imaging. rkshops were also held around new tools in Android like app performance testing.
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The opening keynote kicked off on Thursday morning, but not before many attendees took selfies in front of the massive wrap-around screen.
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After the keynote, some got straight to work, like the people at this table who used old-fashioned paper colored pencils to brainstorm the design of new mobile apps.
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Others played games. In addition to pinball machines, had several arcade game machines set up, a foosball table, even seesaws.
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An attendee plays a first-person shooter game on a oject Tango tablet, ’s next-generation 3D-mapping device. A motion sensor camera inertial gyral sensors on the tablet let the player move through the environment of the game by walking around the actual show floor of the conference. The toy gun was connected to the device so users could fire their shots by pulling on the trigger. ’s oject Tango team has also used the 3D technology to control robots aboard the International Space Station.
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also had a testing lab where attendees could provide the URfor their business or website, to test performance metrics like load time memory usage. Here, the site loaded in less than two seconds, which is quite good, says.
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One of ’s more futuristic efforts is oject cquard, which weaves sensors into fabric like this cotton here. The sensors are woven into patches of the fabric to essentially create a touch screen. By moving your finger across the patch in different directions, you could control the songs playing on the connected smartphone. As a form of wearable technology, ’s vision is that the smart fabric might be incorporated into clothing that can let people perform a variety of tasks.
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For at least one attendee, I/O was exhausting.
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This rig was made through ’s new mp program for virtual reality, an effort to create a camera system capable of recording immersive 3D video in 360 degrees. Here, the rig contains 16 Goo cameras. This summer, people will be able to view mp videos on YouTube while wearing Cardboard, a device for VR apps that works when a smartphone is inserted into it. To the right, a woman is watching a video on Cardboard that was created with the rig.
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A group receives a demo of a video shot with the Goo rig on Cardboard, transporting them to places far away. Is this the future?
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Using the site Androidify.com, people could create their own custom avatars then display them across this wall of Android phones tablets. But here, two attendees apparently were content to just stare into the void.