Author: Amanda Giasson

Google is bringing mobile games to larger screens.

The massive internet company is not giving up the television playing field to Amazon Fire TV and Apple TV and has its own plans to attract users with Android TV, which, among other features, enables users to engage in mobile gaming on a big screen.

Android TV was announced at Google’s I/O developer conference.

The company held its annual I/O developer event last week in San Francisco on Wednesday, June 25, 2014. During the event, they made several announcements, including their Android TV platform, which Google has designed to work specifically with television sets and is powered by its open source operating system. This is what sets it apart from Amazon and Apple’s TV products.

Android TV is a platform, not a product. Google intends to work with different vendors to have its platform directly integrated into television set top boxes from Razer, Asus, etc. and into TV sets from companies such as Sony.

Android TV will enable users to access and use mobile apps on their TV screens. This means that mobile games will be an accessible option. This is big news, considering 70% of the over 1 billion devices that run Android across the globe, access a minimum of one game during the course of one month. Furthermore, ever since Google announced in 2013 the hub app for Android-based gaming, in the last six month, 100 million users have signed up.

Android TV could have a significant impact on the mobile gaming industry.

The games that were demoed on Android TV during the conference were controlled using Android tablets. Although Google made no mention of making game controllers, it is leaving this option open to its hardware partners.

According to Greg Hartrell, Google Play Games Lead Product Manager, “when the Android TV platform gets adopted, OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] are going to push out a game pad kind of form factor.” He added that “OEMs will bring a variety of different form factors. They’ll continue to grow the ecosystem.”

Google believes that mobile gaming has room to grow on a technological level, as well as on a physical level – beyond the screens of smartphones and tablets. One of the advantages of Android TV is that there is a vast amount of content on Google Play. It will also encourage developers to think about how their games will not only appear on phones and tablets, but on large screens, too.

Students in Sweden have created a concept video for a translation app called “Google Gesture”.

The fictional app, which appeared in the film created by the students at Berghs School of Communication in Stockholm, would be designed to help people understand sign language as it occurs in real time, in other words, it would enable sign language to be translated into speech, which would be made possible when the app is used in conjunction with wearable technology.

Many news reporters were fooled into believing the concept and service were real and from Google.

Although the video concept looks real, it is not, nor does the service exist. Furthermore, Google currently has nothing to do with this wearable tech idea. Several news reporters released apologies and had to make corrections to their original news material that initially stated the service existed and that it was a joint project between Google and the Swedish students, neither of which are true.

Due to the fact that the fictional app was called “Google Gesture” and because the video makes reference to Google Translate and the company’s philosophy in the video, this may have generated confusion and lead to the wrong assumptions.

The innovative sign language wearable technology idea may, one day, break language barriers.

According to the video, “Google Gesture” works with a forearm band that pays close attention to the muscle movements that are made during signing and analyzes the gestures. This is a process known as electromyography. Theoretically speaking, the analysis of these movements would be sent to the app and translated into audible words. The translation would occur in real time. Thus, as the person signs wearing the bands, the corresponding words are spoken out loud via the app.

The video states, “The vast majority of people don’t understand sign language, which means a lot of interesting conversations never take place.” The goal of the concept app is to overcome this problem by enabling sign language to be translated immediately. This would eliminate conversation lulls that typically occur and causes the signing person to wait for the audio to start.

Although “Google Gesture” is not real and is not linked to Google, the company has previously developed software to assist the deaf. For instance, Android’s Google Translate app has a feature that enables users to convert speech into text. It will be interesting to see if the wearable technology idea from the students in Sweden will ever evolve into more than a concept.