It’s been nearly three weeks, and I’m finally getting around to sharing the highlights of our OpenWorld 2015. Enjoy.
Keynotes
Last year, Steve Miranda showed some of our project work in his keynote. This year, our Glance framework on the Apple Watch, made an appearance in Larry Ellison’s first keynote in a video showcasing the evolution of Oracle’s User Experience over the last 30 years.
OTN Community Quest
Noel (@noelportugal) and I oversaw the OTN Community Quest during OOW and JavaOne this year.
We registered more than 300 players. Of those, more than half completed more than one task, and we had 18 players finish all nine tasks.
One major change we made to the game after the Kscope15 Scavenger Hunt was to change from a points system to a drawing, allowing anyone to play, at any time during the game and have a good shot to win.
An unintentional proof point, the Grand Prize winner completed only one task.
Here’s a short video explaining what it was, how to play and why we did it.
I know Noel would like me to mention a cool feature for this iteration of the game. He wrote some code to have the Amazon Echo draw the winning entries, which was a pretty sweet demo.
Big thanks to our longtime and very good friends at OTN for letting us do this.
OAUX Exchange
Speaking of Alexa, the Amazon Echo’s persona and our favorite toy lately, it featured prominently in the IoT Smart Office our team built to show at the OAUX Exchange.
Alexa and the smart badge were only parts of the whole experience, which included proximity using BLE beacons, voice-controlled environment settings and voice-controlled Cloud Applications navigation, just to hit the highlights.
The Smart Office wow feature was this Leap Motion interaction, grabbing a record from one screen and throwing it to another.
But wait, there was more. We showed the Glance Framework running on Android Auto, on an actual car head unit.
And for our annual fun demo, Myo gestural armbands used to control Anki race cars, because why not? Special thanks to Guanyi for running this demo for us.
Research
Thao (@thaobnguyen) and her team we busy throughout the conference conducting research, running a focus group and doing ad hoc interviews, a.k.a. guerrilla testing.
Ben, Tawny and Guido, our crack team of researchers.
Miscellaneous
Our team had very busy and very successful OpenWorld. For the complete story on all the OAUX OpenWorld 2015 happenings, check out the Storify.
And finally two other noteworthy, but not OOW-related happenings I should mention.
Mark (@mvilrokx) and Raymond (@yuhuaxie) were interviewed about MakerFaire by Profit magazine. Check out what the veteran makers had to say.
Speaking of Mark and making, Business Insider covered his IoT Nerf gun project. Check out his instructions if you want to make your own.
Anki Cars hacking rocks!