Slideshow

Google I/O 2015 in photos

12 Photos Zach Miners (IDG News Service)

Google's annual developer conference was big, weird and futuristic. Here's some things that caught our eye

  • Using the site Androidify.com, people could create their own custom avatars and then display them across this wall of Android phones and tablets. But here, two attendees apparently were content to just stare into the void.

  • A group receives a demo of a video shot with the GoPro rig on Cardboard, transporting them to places far away. Is this the future?

  • This rig was made through Google's new Jump 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 GoPro cameras. This summer, people will be able to view Jump videos on YouTube while wearing Google 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.

  • For at least one attendee, Google I/O was exhausting.

  • One of Google's more futuristic efforts is Project Jacquard, 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, Google's vision is that the smart fabric might be incorporated into clothing that can let people perform a variety of tasks.

  • Google also had a testing lab where attendees could provide the URL for their business or website, to test its performance like load time and memory usage. Here, the site loaded in less than 2 seconds, which is quite good, Google says.

  • An attendee plays a first-person shooter game on a Project Tango tablet, Google's next-generation 3D-mapping device. A motion sensor camera and inertial and 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. Google's Project Tango team has also used the 3D technology to control robots aboard the International Space Station.

  • Others played games. In addition to pinball machines, Google had several arcade game machines set up, a foosball table, and even seesaws.

  • After the keynote, some got straight to work, like the people at this table who used old-fashioned paper and colored pencils to brainstorm the design of new mobile apps.

  • The opening keynote kicked off on Thursday morning, but not before many attendees took selfies in front of the massive wrap-around screen.

  • Roughly 5,600 people attended this year's show, according to Google, which was spread out among three levels of the Moscone Center. Various booths and work stations, designed around geometric patterns, were set up throughout the show floor. The booths were devoted to Google's software tools for third party developers as well as futuristic Google projects like its Tango tablet for 3D imaging. Workshops were also held around new tools in Android like app performance testing.

  • Like previous years, Google I/O 2015 was held at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco, pictured at the right, May 28 and 29. As Google's annual confab for third-party developers, engineers from across the world attended the show to hear about Google's latest products and services. This year, Google revealed, among other services, Android Pay, a new way to purchase items in brick-and-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 to control devices in the home and let them talk to each other; and a new photo sharing app called Google Photos.

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