Google will be keeping track of the environment with 400 sensors

May 14, 2013 09:20 GMT  ·  By

Google I/O is right around the corner, and Google has been preparing for the yearly developer conference.

While most Googlers have been working on the products they're about to unveil or the sessions they're holding with developers, some have put together a plan to record everything that happens at the conference.

Google has always been a fan of data, so it's now setting up an array of Arduin-based sensors, hundreds of them, around the conference floor and rooms, to record all sorts of things like temperature, sound levels, humidity, air quality, and so on.

All of the data will be recorded in real time. The plans for the sensors and the code for the cloud app that keeps track of all of them will be made available as open source after the conference.

"We wanted to help attendees gain more insight about the conference space and the environment itself. Which developer Sandboxes were the busiest? Which were the loudest locations, and which were the best places to take a quick nap?," Google explained the reasoning behind the initiative.

"We think about data problems all the time, and this looked like an interesting big data challenge that we could try to solve," it added.

One of the more interesting things Google will be doing is analyzing sounds. It plans to determine which developer sandboxes generate the most discussions, it will listen to footsteps and determine the flow of people in real time, and so on.

There's no real end-game for all of this; Google just wants to collect interesting data. But the project will benefit developers once the entire software and hardware stack are made available as open source for anyone to use or modify.

What's more, it's also a real-world application for the Google Cloud Platform; the project will use the App Engine Datastore and Google Cloud Endpoints. Finally, the Google Compute Engine is used to analyze and aggregate the data.