Google to Collect Environmental Info During Google I/O

Google I/O 2013, we are hoping,will be a massive event that will take place on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week. The company knows that the floors of the Moscone Center in San Francisco will be buzzing with developers and press alike, and it wants to help improve the experience during future events. In an effort to do that, the company announced on Monday that the Google Cloud Platform team will monitor the air temperature, air quality, humidity, the noise level and even footsteps of volunteers using Arduino-based sensors. There will be more than 4,000 data streams coming in at once. Talk about innovation!

“We wanted to help attendees gain more insight about the conference space and the environment itself,” Google developer programs engineer Michael Manoochehri said in a blog post. “Which developer Sandboxes were the busiest? Which were the loudest locations, and which were the best places to take a quick nap? We think about data problems all the time, and this looked like an interesting big data challenge that we could try to solve. So this year, we decided to try to answer our questions with a project that’s a bit different, kind of futuristic, and maybe a little crazy.”

Google hopes this type of technology can later be used on a much larger scale to help plan cities more efficiently or in other use cases. It will publish all of its data to Google I/O attendees and hopes that developers take advantage of it and realize how important open hardware and software is.

We all knew Google aims at perfection with innovation always, however, we will just have to wait and see how this all turns out to be. If it is a successful venture, we know it can take us places.

Good going, Google!