Google's vision for IoT gadgets isn't simply focused on smart speakers and Amazon Echo-like devices.
How about a robot hand that can play rock, paper, scissors with you? Or what about an artificial flower that can change its color depending on your mood?
At Google I/O, the tech giant has been showing off these concept designs, hoping they'll inspire developers to build around its new IoT platform, Android Things, which moved out of beta on Monday.
IoT gadgets are certainly nothing new and often end up being smart home appliances. But Android Things is designed to help vendors streamline the whole process of making them. The IoT platform offers a stripped-down version of Android that's been optimized to work on less powerful computing hardware from Qualcomm, MediaTek and the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
On top of all this, Android Things contains another notable perk. It can also help developers incorporate some of Google's AI-powered machine-learning algorithms into their IoT gadgets.
The capabilities were illustrated by a Google-developed concept design called "Handbot," a robot arm that can play, rock, paper, scissors. The machine can both form the hand gestures, and also recognize what shapes your own hand is making when playing the game. When you win, Handbot will glow green, if you lose it'll glow red, whereas yellow means you've tied.
Helping Handbot to read your hand shapes is a camera, which sends the images to a computer algorithm that can decipher which gestures are being made.
Google used a similar approach when developing a prototype artificial flower that'll change color according to your facial expressions. For instance, it'll turn blue when you look sad toward the flower and red when you appear angry. The flower can do this because it's built with a camera that can recognize the expressions on your face.
What made these gadgets notable is that they work without an internet connection. The computer algorithms onboard have already been trained to recognize hand gestures and facial features, according to Google's engineers.
Other concepts on display included a Roomba-like robot that'll snap your photo and then attempt to draw it with a black marker. The robot will do this by rolling over a piece of white paper back and forth, and dabbing it with ink to draw your face.
The AI-powered features weren't always perfect. For instance, the rock, paper, scissors-playing robot didn't always recognize what hand gestures were being made. But Google engineers said that the concepts built using Android Things generally took only a few weeks to develop.