Google’s senior vice president of products, Sundar Pichai, put emphasis on creating a smooth, intuitive mobile experience across devices and location. For example, Android M sports easily accessible in-app permissions and can deliver light versions of search results that consume less data for users in remote locations.
To combat battery drain, Google announced Doze. The new feature uses motion detection to determine when a device hasn’t been in use, then shuts down battery-heavy processes. In tests, a Nexus 9 handset using Android M lasted twice as long in standby as a Nexus 9 using the previous generation, Android Lollipop.
Google was “heavily involved in creating the USB type C standard,” Vice President of Engineering Dave Burke said during Thursday’s keynote. The bi-directional interconnect lets users choose whether they want to charge a device or have the device act as a charger.
In addition, Android M supports NFC-based Android Pay with support for fingerprint identification using a standard API that works across devices and sensors.
Those features may come in handy for the latest release of Android Wear, now supported on 1,500 different watch faces. The OS for wearables now has Wi-Fi support, an always-on screen that can operate in a low-power black-and-white display mode, swiping by a turn of the wrist, and the ability to draw a picture that is immediately translated into an emoji.
Android M will be available in the third quarter of this year.
Google announced a new operating system geared for the Internet of Things. Brillo is the result of a collaboration between Nest, Chrome, and Android teams to develop an end-to-end solution with a small footprint.
Brillo has support for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy built in. Developers are working with Nest to add support for the Thread mesh networking protocol and other connectivity standards. Devices using Brillo can also be managed from a remote console.
Connecting billions of devices to the Internet can be a challenge, and making sure those devices can communicate which each other presents another set of difficulties. Google announced Weave, an open communications protocol, to deal with this issue.
“We need not just a common language but a shared understanding so devices can not only talk to a watch other but to things in the cloud,” Pichai said.
Google provided few details on Brillo or Weave ahead of developer previews in the fall, presumably because design decisions are still in process. Early reports said Brillo would run in as little as 32 Mbytes memory, but Google would only say it has minimal system requirements and broad silicon support.
The company described Weave as a high-level language, suggesting it might compete with the applications-layer software of the AllSeen Alliance, part of the Linux Foundation.
Google plans to create a certification program for Weave and added that the protocol works across platforms — so it can run on Brillo or another operating system. Brillo will be available to developers in the third quarter of this year and Weave will be available in full stack during the fourth quarter.
One of the most exciting parts of Google I/O is the unveiling of new projects. Targeting new smartphone users in hard to reach areas, Google has deployed high altitude balloons to fill Internet coverage gaps.
Project Loon balloons spend 100 days traveling 20 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. Algorithms manage the movement of the balloons to form one large communications network. A box underneath the balloon canopy contains circuit boards to control the system, radio antennas, and lithium ion batteries to store solar power so the balloons can operate throughout the night.
A Loon balloon can support mobile data rates of up to 10 Mbits/second and cover an area the size of Rhode Island, Pichai said. Google is in discussions with several telecom operators to share cellular spectrum and deploy the balloons at a wider scale.
Google Expeditions aims to take the company’s Cardboard virtual reality goggles into classrooms, enabling virtual field trips to places around the world. An Expedition cart would come with enough Cardboards and phones for a classroom, and a tablet for a teacher, said Clay Bavor, vice president of product management for Cardboard.
To create the immersive experiences needed for virtual reality, Google partnered with GoPro to develop Jump — an open source VR video capturing system that uses 16 GoPro cameras in a circular array. Bavor described an assembly that uses computer vision and computational photography to merge all the video feeds into one 360-degree image.
Samsung showed a similar design called Project Beyond described as a lab project at its developer conference in November. Google’s Jump will be available this summer.
About the author:
Jessica Lipsky is Associate Editor of EE Times