The AppsLab

For the last 6 years, each Friday, I have been bringing a mobile painting studio to my kids’ school. Among other things, we work on what I call “color studies” – a set of formal exercises aimed to sharpen one’s sense of color and develop painting skill, just like musical scales, chords and arrpedgios sharpen… Read More

Oracle hosted the first-ever company co-sponsored Maker Faire event on November 17, 2016. When I heard of the event, I had something in my mind that I would encourage a group of middle-schoolers to make a game for the event. I have been teaching them occasionally on Arduino, NodeMCU and MQTT concept over some weekends,… Read More

Last week my kids’ school went on a field trip to the University of Santa Cruz to observe a black hole multimedia exhibition. We were invited there by Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, the astrophysicist and the fellow parent at the school. When Enrico is not busy pushing the frontiers of science (he is partial to violent explosions),… Read More

When tech media started proclaiming 2016 as the year of the bots, they seem to have nailed it. At Oracle we have at least three groups working on bots, OAUX included. One of the latest forays into bots was a Personal Assistant Technologies (PAT) hackathon, organized by Laurie Pattison’s (@lsptahoe) Apps UX Innovation Events team, open… Read More

I have been always intrigued by the fact that people get deeply attached to the characters in the game (e.g. Second Life), or virtual pets. And with sufficient advancement in technology, the virtual characters may eventually cross the boundary and get attached to real-life people (e.g. Sci-Fi movie such as “Her”). While that is still… Read More

This is part 2 of my blog post series about the Ambient Visualization hardware (part 1).  Also, please read John’s post on details about the creation of the actual visualization, from concept to build.  In the first part, I focused on the hardware, a sonar sensor connected to a NodeMCU.  In this second part, the focal… Read More

As John mentioned in his post, one of the projects I worked on for OOW16 was the devices to provide the data to his Ambient Display.  Unlike previous years, where we record attendance and then produce a report a few days or weeks after OOW, Jake proposed that we’d somehow visualize the data in real-time and show it… Read More

This year I had the great opportunity to attend in person Oracle OpenWorld 2016 and JavaOne 2016. Since I was student, I heard how fantastic and big is this conference but you cannot realize it until you are in it. All San Francisco is taken by a bunch of personalities from all companies around the… Read More

OK, it wasn’t me exactly. It was more like some of my software-based representatives. Hi, I’m Ed (@edhjones). And I’m not one of the AppsLab folks. But I’m always interested in the work they do, so I try to hang out with them whenever we’re co-located. I was intrigued then when, a couple of months… Read More

We have been quietly observing and evaluating our options before we finally decided to get a telepresence robot. Telepresence technology dates back to 1993 (Human Productivity Lab) and telepresence robots are not completely new. There is a growing array of telepresence robot options (see comparison) and the list is bound to get cheaper and better. Before we… Read More

Companies talk about “Gamification,” but the first time I felt like I was playing a game at work was driving our Double telepresence robot around the office floor, rolling down the hallway and poking into cubicles. With a few simple controls—forward, backward, left, and right—it took me back to the D-pad on my NES, trying… Read More

In last post, we have setup development environment for coding and uploading scratches to NodeMCU, an IoT device. This post, we will upload and run two examples to demonstrate how IoT device sending data into Cloud and receiving commands from Cloud. You can find the source code and MQTT library requirement on github. 4. Architecture Diagram It… Read More

Attention:  if you reach this page at Kscope 2017 – IoT Workshop, please follow this link for the updated session content:  https://github.com/raymondxie/iotws/wiki AppsLab and OTN will jointly host IoT Workshop at Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne conference in 2016. We look forward to seeing you at the Workshop. Here is some details about the Workshop with… Read More

Want to learn more about the Internet of Things? Are you attending Oracle OpenWorld 2016 or JavaOne 2016? Then you are in luck! Once again we have partnered with the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) team to give OOW16 and JavaOne attendees an IoT hands-on workshop. We will provide a free* IoT Cloud Kit so you can get your feet wet on… Read More