Author Archives: Google Devs

Tango developer workshop brings stories to life

Posted by Eitan Marder-Eppstein, Senior Software Engineer for Tango

Technology helps us connect and communicate with others -- from sharing commentary and photos on social media to a posting a video with breaking news, digital tools enable us to craft stories and share them with the world.

Tango can enhance storytelling by bringing augmented reality into our surroundings. Recently, the Tango team hosted a three-day developer workshop around how to use this technology to tell incredible stories through mobile devices. The workshop included a wide range of participants, from independent filmmakers and developers to producers and creatives at major media companies. By the end of the workshop, a number of new app prototypes had been created. Here are some of the workshop highlights:

  • The New York Times experimented with ways to connect people with news stories by creating 3D models of the places where the events happened.
  • The Wall Street Journal prototyped an app called ViewPoint to bring location-based stories to life. When you’re in front of a monument, for example, you can see AR content and pictures that someone else took at that site.
  • Line experimented with bringing 3D characters to life. For example, app users could see AR superheros in front of them, and then their friend could jump into the characters’ costumes.
  • Google’s Mobile Vision Team brought music to life by letting people point their phones at various objects and visualize the vibrations that music makes on them.

We even had an independent developer use Tango to create realtime video stabilization tool. We’re looking forward to seeing these apps—and many more—come to life. If you want to start building your own storytelling and visual communication apps for augmented reality, check out our developer page and join our G+ community.

Modernizing OAuth interactions in Native Apps for Better Usability and Security

Posted by William Denniss, Product Manager, Identity and Authentication

The Identity team is constantly striving to help Google users sign-in to third-party applications with their Google account in a secure and seamless way, and enable users to share select information from their account such as their calendar or contact information with other apps, when they wish to do so.

Under the hood these interactions happen via OAuth requests, and over the years Google has supported a number of ways for developers to implement OAuth flows with us. With improved security and usability in mind, we will soon be ending the support for one of these ways. In the coming months, we will no longer allow OAuth requests to Google in embedded browsers known as “web-views”, such as the WebView UI element on Android and UIWebView/WKWebView on iOS, and equivalents on Windows and OS X.


Using the device browser for OAuth requests instead of an embedded web-view can improve the usability of your apps significantly: users only need to sign-in to Google once per device, improving conversion rates of sign-in and authorization flows in your app. Modern “in-app browser tab” patterns available on some operating systems, such as Chrome Custom Tabs on Android and SFSafariViewController on iOS offer further UX improvements for browser-based OAuth flows.

In contrast, the outdated method of using embedded browsers for OAuth means a user must sign-in to Google each time, instead of using the existing logged-in session from the device. The device browser also provides improved security as apps are able to inspect and modify content in a web-view, but not content shown in the browser.

To help you migrate, we offer libraries and samples that follow modern best practices which you can use:

  • Google Sign-In for Android and iOS, our recommended SDK for sign-in and OAuth with Google Accounts.
  • AppAuth for Android, iOS, and OS X, an open source OAuth client library that can be used with Google and other OAuth providers. We also offer GTMAppAuth (for iOS and OS X), a library which enables AppAuth support for the Google APIs Client Library for Objective-C, and the GTM Session Fetcherprojects.
  • Google Sign-in and OAuth Examples for Windows, examples demonstrating how to use the browser to authenticate Google users in various Windows environments such as Universal Windows Platform (UWP), console and desktop apps.

You can also read protocol-level documentation for our standards-based support of OAuth for Native Apps, and an IETF best current practice draft on this topic.

Versions of Google Sign-In on iOS prior to version 3.0 don’t support the current industry best practices of the in-app browser tab, and therefore are also deprecated. If you use Google Sign-In, please update to the latest version to get all the recent security and usability improvements. For now, this policy does not remove our support of WebView on iOS 8, however we may start to display notices encouraging users to upgrade their device for better security.

The rollout schedule for the deprecation of web-views for OAuth requests to Google is as follows. Starting October 20, 2016, we will prevent new OAuth clients from using web-views on platforms with a viable alternative, and will phase in user-facing notices for existing OAuth clients. On April 20, 2017, we will start blocking OAuth requests using web-views for all OAuth clients on platforms where viable alternatives exist.

If you have any questions with the migration, please post to Stack Overflow tagged with “google-oauth”.

Google Developers to open a startup space in San Francisco

Posted by Roy Glasberg Global Lead, Launchpad Accelerator

We’re heading to the city of San Francisco this September to open a new space for developers and startups. With over 14,000 sq. ft. at 301 Howard Street, we’ll have more than enough elbow room to train, educate and collaborate with local and international developers and startups.

The space will hold a range of events: Google Developer Group community meetups, Codelabs, Design Sprints, and Tech Talks. It will also host the third class of Launchpad Accelerator, our equity-free accelerator for startups in emerging markets. During each class, over 20 Google teams provide comprehensive mentoring to late-stage app startups who seek to scale and become leaders in their local markets. The 3-month program starts with an all-expenses-paid two week bootcamp at Google HQ.

Developers are in an ever-changing landscape and seek technical training. We’ve also seen a huge surge in the number of developers starting their own companies. Lastly, this is an unique opportunity to bridge the gap between Silicon Valley and emerging markets. To date Launchpad Accelerator has nearly 50 alumni in India, Indonesia, Brazil and Mexico. Startups in these markets are tackling critical local problems, but they often lack access to the resources and network we have here. This dedicated space will enable us to regularly engage with developers and serve their evolving needs, whether that is to build a product, grow a company or make revenue.

We can’t wait to get started and work with developers to build successful businesses that have a positive impact locally and globally.

A Google Santa Tracker update from Santa’s Elves

Sam Thorogood, Developer Programs Engineer

Today, we're announcing that the open source version of Google's Santa Tracker has been updated with the Android and web experiences that ran in December 2015. We extended, enhanced and upgraded our code, and you can see how we used our developer products - including Firebase and Polymer - to build a fun, educational and engaging experience.

To get started, you can check out the code on GitHub at google/santa-tracker-weband google/santa-tracker-android. Both repositories include instructions so you can build your own version.

Santa Tracker isn’t just about watching Santa’s progress as he delivers presents on December 24. Visitors can also have fun with the winter-inspired experiences, games and educational content by exploring Santa's Village while Santa prepares for his big journey throughout the holidays.

Below is a summary of what we’ve released as open source.

Android app

  • The Santa Tracker Android app is a single APK, supporting all devices, such as phones, tablets and TVs, running Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) and up. The source code for the app can be found here.
  • Santa Tracker leverages Firebase features, including Remote Config API, App Invites to invite your friends to play along, and Firebase Analytics to help our elves better understand users of the app.
  • Santa’s Village is a launcher for videos, games and the tracker that responds well to multiple devices such as phones and tablets. There's even an alternative launcher based on the Leanback user interface for Android TVs.

  • Games on Santa Tracker Android are built using many technologies such as JBox2D (gumball game), Android view hierarchy (memory match game) and OpenGL with special rendering engine (jetpack game). We've also included a holiday-themed variation of Pie Noon, a fun game that works on Android TV, your phone, and inside Google Cardboard's VR.

Android Wear

  • The custom watch faces on Android Wear provide a personalized touch. Having Santa or one of his friendly elves tell the time brings a smile to all. Building custom watch faces is a lot of fun but providing a performant, battery friendly watch face requires certain considerations. The watch face source code can be found here.
  • Santa Tracker uses notifications to let users know when Santa has started his journey. The notifications are further enhanced to provide a great experience on wearables using custom backgrounds and actions that deep link into the app.

On the web

  • Santa Tracker is mobile-first: this year's experience was built for the mobile web, including an amazing brand new, interactive - yet fully responsive, village: with three breakpoints, touch gesture support and support for the Web App Manifest.
  • To help us develop Santa at scale, we've upgraded to Polymer 1.0+. Santa Tracker's use of Polymer demonstrates how easy it is to package code into reusable components. Every housein Santa's Village is a custom element, only loaded when needed, minimizing the startup cost of Santa Tracker.

  • Many of the amazing new games (like Present Bounce) were built with the latest JavaScript standards (ES6) and are compiled to support older browsers via the Google Closure Compiler.
  • Santa Tracker's interactive and fun experience is enhanced using the Web Animations API, a standardized JavaScript APIfor unifying animated content.
  • We simplified the Chromecast support this year, focusing on a great screensaver that would countdown to the big event on December 24th - and occasionally autoplay some of the great video content from around Santa's Village.

We hope that this update inspires you to make your own magical experiences based on all the interesting and exciting components that came together to make Santa Tracker!

Adding a bit more reality to your augmented reality apps with Tango

Posted by Sean Kirmani, Software Engineering Intern, Tango

Augmented reality scenes, where a virtual object is placed in a real environment, can surprise and delight people whether they’re playing with dominoes or trying to catch monsters. But without support for environmental lighting, these virtual objects can stick out rather than blend in with their environments. Ambient lighting should bleed onto an object, real objects should be seen in reflective surfaces, and shade should darken a virtual object.

Tango-enabled devices can see the world like we do, and they’re designed to bring mobile augmented reality closer to real reality. To help bring virtual objects to life, we’ve updated the Tango Unity SDK to enable developers to add environmental lighting to their Tango apps. Here’s how to get started:

Let’s dive in!

Before we begin, you’ll need to download the Tango Unity SDK. Then you can follow the steps below to make your reality a little brighter.

Step 1: Create a new Unity project and import the Tango SDK package into the project.

Step 2: Create a new scene. If you need help with this, check out the solar system tutorial from a previous post. Then you’ll add Tango Manager and Tango AR Camera prefabs to your scene and remove the default Main Camera game object. Also remove the artificial directional light. We won’t need that anymore. After doing this, you should see the scene hierarchy like this:

Step 3: In the Tango Manager game object, you’ll want to check Enable Video Overlay and set the method to Texture and Raw Bytes.

Step 4: Under Tango AR Camera, look for the Tango Environmental Lighting component. Make that the the Enable Environmental Lighting checkbox is checked.

Step 5: Add your game object that you’d like to be environmental lit to the scene. In our example, we’ll be using a pool ball. So let’s add a new Sphere.

Step 6: Let’s create a new material for our sphere. Go to Create > Material. We’ll be using our environmental lighting shader on this object. Under Shader, select Tango >Environmental Lighting > Standard.

Step 7: Let’s add a texture to our pool ball and tweak our smoothness parameter. The higher the smoothness, the more reflective our object becomes. Rougher objects have more of a diffuse lighting that is softer and spreads over the surface of the object. You can download the pool_ball_textureand import it into your project.

Step 8: Add your new material to your sphere, so you have a nicer looking pool ball.

Step 9: Compile and run the application again. You should able see environment lit pool ball now!

You can also follow our previous post and be able to place your pool ball on surfaces. You don’t have to worry about your sphere rolling off your surface. Here are some comparison pictures of the pool ball with a static artificial light (left) and with environment lighting (right).

We hope you enjoyed this tutorial combining the joy of environmental lighting with the magic of AR. Stay tuned to this blog for more AR updates and tutorials!

We’re just getting started!

You’ve just created a more realistically light pool ball that live in AR. That’s a great start, but there’s a lot more you can do to make a high performance smartphone AR application. Check out our Unity example code on Github (especially the Augmented Reality example) to learn more about building a good smartphone AR application.

Daydream Labs: positive social experiences in VR

Posted by Robbie Tilton, UX Designer, Google VR

At Daydream Labs, we have experimented with social interactions in VR. Just like in real reality, people naturally want to share and connect with others in VR. As developers and designers, we are excited to build social experiences that are fun and easy to use—but it’s just as important to make it safe and comfortable for all involved. Over the last year, we’ve learned a few ways to nudge people towards positive social experiences.

What can happen without clear social norms

People are curious and will test the limits of your VR experience. For example, when some people join a multiplayer app or game, they might wonder if they can reach their hand through another player’s head or stand inside another avatar’s body. Even with good intentions, this can make other people feel unsafe or uncomfortable.

For example, in a shopping experiment we built for the HTC Vive, two people could enter a virtual storefront and try on different hats, sunglasses, and accessories. There was no limit to how or where they could place a virtual accessory, so some people stuck hats on friends anywhere they would stick—like in front of their eyes. This had the unfortunate effect of blocking their vision. If they couldn’t remove the hat in front of their eyes with their controllers, they had no other recourse than to take off their headset and end their VR experience.


Protecting user safety

Everyone should feel safe and comfortable in VR. If we can anticipate the actions of others, then we may be able to discourage negative social behavior before it starts. For example, by designing personal space around each user, you can prevent other people from invading that personal space.

We built an experiment around playing poker where we tried new ways to discourage trolling. If someone left their seat at the poker table, their environment desaturated to black and white and their avatar would disappear from the other player’s view. A glowing blue personal space bubble would guide the person back to their seat. We found it’s enough to prevent a player from approaching their opponents to steal chips or invade personal space.


Reward positive behavior

If you want people to interact in positive ways—like high-fiving ? —try giving them an incentive. In one experiment, we detected when two different avatars “touched” each other’s hands at high speed. This triggered a loud slapping sound and a fireworks animation. It sounds simple, but people loved it. Meanwhile, if you tried to do something more aggressive, like punching an avatar’s body, nothing would happen. You can guess which behavior people naturally preferred.


Schell Games gives popular games a twist with Tango

Posted by Justin Quimby, Senior Product Manager Tango

At Tech World last month, our team showed off some of the latest Tango-enabled games. One crowd favorite was Domino World by Schell Games which will will be available on the first Tango-enabled device, Lenovo’s Phab 2 Pro, coming this fall. Schell Games has adapted a few classic games, including Jenga, into smartphone augmented reality, and their developers share their experience and considerations they kept in mind as they gave dominoes a new twist.

Google: How did your team first hear about Tango technology?

Schell Games: The Tango team invited us to their Game Developer Workshopwhere we learned about Tango and the types of apps we could develop for this platform.

Google: You took a classic game, and added AR elements. How did you come to dominoes?

Schell Games: At the Game Developer Workshop, we prototyped three games: a racing game, Jenga and a pet game. Of the three games, people connected the most with Jenga.

People loved sharing a device to play the game together—and they loved that they didn’t have to pick up all the Jenga pieces when the game was over! And from a developer perspective, Jenga was great as it highlighted Tango’s ability to recognize surfaces.

Based on how much people liked Jenga, we decided that Domino World would be our second game. Domino World gives players all the fun of dominoes, but without the setup effort or mess. We were inspired by YouTube videos where people of all ages were doing really creative things with dominoes. Our goal was to bring that experience to the phone as an immersive and fun augmented-reality experience.

Google: Which Tango features did you use in Jenga and Domino World?

Schell Games: We used motion tracking, which lets people walk around their dominoes or Jenga tower. We also used surface detection with the depth camera, so that the device recognizes when objects are placed on a surface.

Google: How does your development approach differ for AR apps versus standard mobile apps?

Schell Games: With Domino World, for example, our approach to augmented reality thrives on reinforcing the feeling that the player’s display is a “window on the world.” Toys and dominoes are (virtually) placed on the actual surfaces around the player, and the game’s controls aid players in manipulating objects in the space in front of them. As a result, the player is naturally encouraged move around as they view, adjust and otherwise shape their ever-growing creations.

In contrast, traditional touchscreen controls largely work with metaphors of interacting with the screen’s image itself -- drawing on it, pinch-zooming it, etc. As a result, a more traditional touchscreen-controlled Domino World could have influenced players to remain more static and work with the existing view, as opposed to moving around to different vantage points.

Google: We noticed that you use a landscape orientation for Domino World. How did you decide to take that approach.

Schell Games: The decision to use landscape orientation for Domino World is the result of multiple smaller reasons all put together:

  • Many new players have a tendency to initially build wider versus deeper (possibly due to an instinctive desire to be able to more easily access their domino runs).
  • UI controls at the edges of a landscape layout minimizes HUD overlap when working with wider versus. deeper runs.
  • A landscape orientation naturally places players’ a hands at the device’s corners, which makes for a more stable grip during gameplay.

Google: What surprised you the most while building with Tango?

Schell Games: We were quite surprised at how easy it was to build with the Tango SDK and add Tango functionality to our apps. We used the Unity Engine which made the whole process quite seamless. It took us just over two weeks to build Jenga and 10 weeks to build Domino World from beginning to end.

Google: How do you think Tango will change the way people play games?

Schell Games: Tango makes it easy to play AR games. You don’t need to print and cut out AR trackers or markers to place throughout your room to help orient the phone. Instead, your phone always knows where it is in relation to the AR objects and you can easily start playing—whether you’re in a living room or on a bus. It’s incredible to have this experience with just your mobile device.

Autotrack turns 1.0

Posted by Philip Walton, Developer Programs Engineer

Autotrack is a JavaScript library built for use with analytics.jsthat provides developers with a wide range of plugins to track the most common user interactions relevant to today's modern web.

The first version of autotrack for analytics.js was released on Github earlier this year, and since then the response and adoption from developers has been amazing. The project has been starred over a thousand times, and sites using autotrack are sending millions of hits to Google Analytics every single day.

Today I'm happy to announce that we've released autotrack version 1.0, which includes several new plugins, improvements to the existing plugins, and tons of new ways to customize autotrack to meet your needs.

Note: autotrack is not an official Google Analytics product and does not qualify for Google Analytics 360 support. It is maintained by members of the Google Analytics developer platform team and is primarily intended for a developer audience.

New plugins

Based on the feedback and numerous feature requests we received from developers over the past few months, we've added the following new autotrack plugins:

Impression Tracker

The impression tracker plugin allows you to track when an element is visible within the browser viewport. This lets you much more reliably determine whether a particular advertisement or call-to-action button was seen by the user.

Impression tracking has been historically tricky to implement on the web, particularly in a way that doesn't degrade the performance of your site. This plugin leverages new browser APIs that are specifically designed to track these kinds of interactions in a highly performant way.

Clean URL Tracker

If your analytics implementation sends pageviews to Google Analytics without modifying the URL, then you've probably experienced the problem of seeing multiple different page paths in your reports that all point to the same place. Here's an example:

  • /contact
  • /contact/
  • /contact?hl=en
  • /contact/index.html

The clean URL tracker plugin avoids this problem by letting you set your preferred URL format (e.g. strip trailing slashes, remove index.html filenames, remove query parameters, etc.), and the plugin automatically updates all page URLs based on your preference before sending them to Google Analytics.

Note: setting up View Filters in your Google Analytics view settings is another way to modify the URLs sent to Google Analytics.

Page Visibility Tracker

It's becoming increasingly common for users to visit sites on the web and then leave them open in an inactive browser tab for hours or even days. And when users return to your site, they often won't reload the page, especially if your site fetches new content in the background.

If your site implements just the default javascript tracking snippet, these types of interactions will never be captured.

The page visibility tracker plugin takes a more modern approach to what should constitute a pageview. In addition to tracking when a page gets loaded, it also tracks when the visibility state of the page changes (i.e. when the tab goes into or comes out of the background). These additional interaction events give you more insight into how users behave on your site.

Updates and improvements

In addition to the new plugins added to autotrack, the existing plugins have undergone some significant improvements, most notably in the ability to customize them to your needs.

All plugins that send data to Google Analytics now give you 100% control over precisely what fieldsget sent, allowing you to set, modify, or remove anything you want. This gives advanced users the ability to set their own custom dimensions on hits or change the interaction setting to better reflect how they choose to measure bounce rate.

Users upgrading from previous versions of autotrack should refer to the upgrade guide for a complete list of changes (note: some of the changes are incompatible with previous versions).

Who should use autotrack

Perhaps the most common question we received after the initial release of autotrack is who should use it. This was especially true of Google Tag Managerusers who wanted to take advantage of some of the more advanced autotrack features.

Autotrack is a developer project intended to demonstrate and streamline some advanced tracking techniques with Google Analytics, and it's primarily intended for a developer audience. Autotrack will be a good fit for small to medium sized developer teams who already have analytics.js on their website or who prefer to manage their tracking implementation in code.

Large teams and organizations, those with more complex collaboration and testing needs, and those with tagging needs beyond just Google Analytics should instead consider using Google Tag Manager. While Google Tag Manager does not currently support custom analytics.js plugins like those that are part of autotrack, many of the same tracking techniques are easy to achieve with Tag Manager’s built-in triggers, and others may be achieved by pushing data layer events based on custom code on your site or in Custom HTML tags in Google Tag Manager. Read Google Analytics Events in the Google Tag Manager help center to learn more about automatic event tracking based on clicks and form submissions.

Next steps

If you're not already using autotrack but would like to, check out the installation and usage section of the documentation. If you already use autotrack and want to upgrade to the latest version, be sure to read the upgrade guide first.

To get a sense of what the data captured by autotrack looks like, the Google Analytics Demos & Tools site includes several reports displaying its own autotrack usage data. If you want to go deeper, the autotrack library is open source and can be a great learning resource. Have a read through the plugin source code to get a better understanding of how some of the advanced analytics.js features work.

Lastly, if you have feedback or suggestions, please let us know. You can report bugs or submit any issues on Github.

Mobile web and machine learning solutions: Case studies from Launchpad Accelerator

Roy Glasberg, Global Lead, Launchpad and Launchpad Accelerator

Last month, the second cohort of Launchpad Accelerator, Google’s high-touch global program for late-stage startups, came and conquered their app challenges with the help of mentors at Google HQ.

What did they learn that they’d like to share with developers across the world? Check out the video below for solutions from 3 different startups, and an in-depth review of MagicPin’s mobile web challenge and solution.


Startup:

MagicPinfrom India is a social network app that curates a local user base around locations, allowing merchants to connect with these specific audiences.

Mobile web challenge:

In India, downloading an app requires a high commitment. On average a user would keep 5 or 6 apps on their phone. According to Anshoo Sharma, Co-Founder and CEO, MagicPin, “If you want to be the next app that they download, there is a high barrier.”

Jordan Adler, Google Developer Advocate: “Devices in markets like India have limited space--on average 128 MB of memory--and when you add in system features only 40 bytes of user space is left. And if a typical APK is a few megabytes, you can only have a few apps before you have to stop downloading.”

Solution:

Jordan Adler: “One of the great things about Progressive Web Apps is you don’t have to request the commitment (to download an app) upfront. You can start to build a relationship with the user through the web interface, and over time the web app can become more like a native app, it can be housed on a device, cache content and work offline.”

Anshoo Sharma: “In the last 1.5 weeks we have been here we have already launched a micro version of our platform on Progressive Web Apps. And the experience is great! Without using the (mobile) app people can get as good an experience.”

About Launchpad Accelerator

Launchpad Accelerator is a six-month accelerator that enables late-stage app startups from emerging markets to successfully scale. Here's a two-minute video about the Accelerator.

I/O session: Location and Proximity Superpowers: Eddystone + Google Beacon Platform

Originally posted on Geo Developers blog

Bluetooth beacons mark important places and objects in a way that your phone understands. Last year, we introduced the Google beacon platform including Eddystone, Nearby Messages and the Proximity Beacon API that helps developers build beacon-powered proximity and location features in their apps.
Since then, we’ve learned that when deployment of physical infrastructure is involved, it’s important to get the best possible value from your investment. That’s why the Google beacon platform works differently from the traditional approach.
We don’t think of beacons as only pointing to a single feature in an app, or a single web resource. Instead, the Google beacon platform enables extensible location infrastructure that you can manage through your Google Developer project and reuse many times. Each beacon can take part in several different interactions: through your app, through other developers’ apps, through Google services, and the web. All of this functionality works transparently across Eddystone-UID and Eddystone-EID -- because using our APIs means you never have to think about monitoring for the individual bytes that a beacon is broadcasting.
For example, we’re excited that the City of Amsterdam has adopted Eddystone and the newly released publicly visible namespace feature for the foundation of their open beacon network. Or, through Nearby Notifications, Eddystone and the Google beacon platform enable explorers of the BFG Dream Jar Trail to discover cloud-updateable content in Dream Jars across London.
To make getting started as easy as possible we’ve provided a set of tools to help developers, including links to beacon manufacturers that can help you with Eddystone, Beacon Tools (for Android and iOS), the Beacon Dashboard, a codelab and of course our documentation. And, if you were not able to attend Google I/O in person this year, you can watch my session, Location and Proximity Superpowers: Eddystone + Google Beacon Platform:
We can’t wait to see what you build!
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 About Peter: I am a Product Manager for the Google beacon platform, including the open beacon format Eddystone, and Google's cloud services that integrate beacon technology with first and third party apps. When I’m not working at Google I enjoy taking my dog, Oscar, for walks on Hampstead Heath.