Beacons the Internet of things and more Coffee with Timothy Jordan

Posted by Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate

In this episode of Coffee With a Googler, Laurence meets with Developer Advocate Timothy Jordan to talk about all things Ubiquitous Computing at Google. Learn about the platforms and services that help developers reach their users wherever it makes sense.

We discuss Brillo, which extends the Android Platform to Internet of Things embedded devices, as well as Weave, which is a services layer that helps all those devices work together seamlessly.

We also chat about beacons and how they can give context to the world around you, making the user experience simpler. Traditionally, users need to tell you about their location, and other types of context. But with beacons, the environment can speak to you. When it comes to developing for beacons, Timothy introduces us to Eddystone, a protocol specification for BlueTooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons, the Proximity Beacon API that allows developers to register a beacon and associate data with it, and the Nearby Messages API which helps your app sight and retrieve data about nearby beacons.

Timothy and his team have produced a new Udacity series on ubiquitous computing that you can access for free! Take the course to learn more about ubiquitous computing, the design paradigms involved, and the technical specifics for extending to Android Wear, Google Cast, Android TV, and Android Auto.

Also, dont forget to join us for a ubiquitous computing summit on November 9th & 10th in San Francisco. Sign up here and well keep you updated.

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Learn about Vulkan and 3D Graphics Coffee with Shannon Woods

Posted by, Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate

Vulkan is the new generation, open standard API for efficient access to graphics and compute on modern GPUs. In this episode of Coffee with a Googler, Laurence meets with Shannon Woods, a Technical Program Manager in Google’s rendering teams to talk about plumbing code from your app down to the GPU!

Historically mobile apps have used Open GL ES to communicate with the GPU, but the hardware and API have evolved separately, impacting efficiency. Vulkan has been designed to organize the graphics space in much the same way as the underlying GPU, so it can be more efficient.

Android will support both Open GL ES and Vulkan, so developers can choose which API is right for them — and with Vulkan, precise control over the commands executed by the GPU allows for great optimization, as well as parallelization of code.

We also learn about the famous Utah Teapot, a standard reference object for 3D modellers, and how it is found in popular culture -- such as showing up in most animated movies. Have you spotted it?

Watch this episode for some great guidance from Shannon on what you need to do as a developer to prepare for Vulkan, and how using could be of benefit to your apps!

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