Postcards from I/O
Hey!
Our CTO David Evans and I headed down to Mountain View for Google’s annual I/O conference last week!
The weather was beautiful, wish you were there.
But, you weren’t, or at least I didn’t see you, so you’ll have to settle for these virtual postcards.*
Just a Line’s newest build, using ARCore’s Cloud Anchors to create a shared drawing experience, was unveiled in the Developer Keynote!
Drawing with friends in AR is pretty amazing, and so we couldn’t wait to show more people how to do it.
We got to take a bunch of friendly folks through the new experience in the Creative Lab’s Experiments with Google area.
We had responses to Just a Line across the board, from very excited “This was in the keynote!” and “Wow this is so cool!” to skeptical: “Are you going to add colors?” (No, we’re not going to add colors, but it’s open source, so you should!)
Many people were too intimidated to pick the phone up, and stated they weren’t artists. Putting the phone in their hand helped bypass this hangup.
Drawing in 3D is even harder than drawing on a flat surface, and lots of people said so. One of the most common questions was “How do I draw things farther away?” The answer is to move there and draw something!
Stay tuned for the new update of Just a Line with Cloud Anchors, which will be available on Android & iOS in the coming weeks!
There were a ton of other great experiences featured in the dome:
Morse code was added to Gboard after the project was started by developer Tania Finlayson. In the tent, they were demoing Hello Morse, which teaches users morse code.
The Teachable Machine team built a great user interface on the back of the TensorFlow ML platform. They had a set up that took pictures of a user’s hands doing different gestures, or using blocks that correspond to different dance moves. Then, two users competed to perform those gestures and make their bean dance!
Chrome Music Lab: Songmaker had a collection of web-based music activities suitable for use in the classroom.
Of course I spent some time with Move Mirror, based on PoseNet(left).
Other great projects included Nsynth Super, Mixlab, and Mystery Animal.
Women Techmakers holds a social every year before Google I/O where they invite all the female attendees to eat, drink, dance, and get to know each other.
The community is growing every year, and the event keeps getting better.
There were great talks, too!
Using technology in a healthy way is one of the big pushes that Google is making this year. This discussion covered lots of topics, including the downsides to relying on technology—like fewer moments of uncertainty or hardship inoculation—and also how developers can introduce frictions in their software. The idea is, as engineers and designers, we cant help users step away and spend more time with their reflective selves, instead of always in their automatic selves.
There was cool stuff to do in the evenings, as well. Evans spent some more time exploring alternate timelines in the MoDA (Museum of Developer Art) as part of the After Dark activities (video), and we got to see an awesome concert by Justice.
All in all, it was great to see friends and partners, and to share the new Just a Line features.
Check out the app when it comes out in a few weeks, and let us know how you like it!
[*Editor’s note: As opposed to this actual postcard, which arrived from Kat and Evans at I/O the same day we published this story, insert interesting observation about information transmission networks in the 21st century here.]
