Android experiment OBJECT took over 200 submissions for ideas and produced these four futuristic products.
Like it or not, most of our lives are entangled in the tricky web that is created by technology and the devices that we carry. While Apple has continuously been pushing their wireless agenda with iPhone after iPhone, Android-based phones have taken a lion’s share of the available mobile phone market. It might seem like everywhere you look you will see an iPhone, but actually there are seven times more phones that run an Android operating system than Apple’s. With such a stranglehold on market share, you would think there would be more innovative things coming out of the Android camp, especially with tech giant Google backing the little green robot. It turns out that there are, you just have to know where to look for them.
The Japanese division of Android recently released a video documenting four incredibly interesting ideas that might soon arrive for the millions of Android users out there.
From over 200 designs, almost 20,000 votes were cast to decide which objects would move forward past the paper design phase. Perhaps the coolest is the ELI, or English Language Intelligence. Based on Google’s Machine Learning API, this little device records and analyzes a Japanese-speakers’ everyday speech and then creates a list of English vocabulary so that they can learn English words that they would be using in their everyday life.
Also previewed was an on-the-wall “paper” calendar that would sync with your calendar app and keep itself updated, and a pretty neat “telescope” that could use location data in order to show you pictures of your surrounding at different times of the day and year.
The final OBJECT seems like it should be automatically addressed by the politeness of Japanese people, but the Maternity Mark allows someone to alert other users to their pregnant state through a notification on other people’s phone so they can get up and offer their seat to someone in need.
Overall, the OBJECTs just scrape the surface of the kind of interactivity that Android-based phones can offer. Hopefully, there are more of these products coming down soon, and the original four will reach the market with their functionality intact. Until we can turn over our lives to the technological marvels we carry in our pockets, we will continue to use them to document our cat–filled lives.
Source: Android, YouTube/Google Japan