Three weeks to go until droidcon, 75 plus talks on the agenda – and no chance to attend them all. Anyway, let’s sneak a little about what droidcon offers in terms of new hardware:
New kinds of displays, smart, wearable ones precisely, are no commodity yet. But with the prevalence of augmented reality applications smart glasses will for sure become common over time – and pose particular opportunities as well as challenges to developers. That is what Paul Travers from Vuzix, maker of personal devices like a hands-free smart phone diskply, is going to speak about at droidcon.
Klaus Starnberger will give a sum-up of how the Internet of things is getting into the reach of smartphones and tablets for sensing, controlling and utilizing their proximity and neighbourhood. Required are ultra low power wireless technologies like Bluetooth 4.0 or ANT+ of which attendees of this talk will get a deeper understanding. Klaus, a founding partner of the Munich-based startup Innoroute, will also touch on the business aspect of creating new products in order to control threats and opportunities of innovative concepts and architectures.
Manuel Di Cerbo and Andreas Rudolf, both from Nexus-Computing, completed a Bachelor Thesis project at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland called "Using Android in Industrial Automation". The result is Osci, an open source oscilloscope hardware, which can be operated using an app on an Android tablet via USB Host mode. Manuel and Andreas will not only demonstrate Osci but also explain the challenges and opportunities they faced when developing an open source project for Android.
Furthermore, a host of new hardware projects is about to flow in via our Call for APC, which is open the whole year but requires submissions for droidcon Berlin until the 7 April. What is it about? Well, the Android Product Construction challenge aims to create new Android products which are based on an APC board and are different to smartphones and tablets. The best product will be picked on technical merit as well as quality and creativity of the presentation. The best of all products of the year will be award a prize of $2000 at droidcon London in October 2013. Details can be found here.
Next highlights will be about how User Experience, security and testing and how enterprises can make use of Android in professional environments.
