Last weekend was the Google TV Hackathon. The London arm of the event was organised by Londroid and took place in the Google Campus building. We saw some really cool apps and heard even more cool ideas. My general experience of smart TV so far is as a set of new content delivery solutions. I find this extremely boring. TVs have been delivering content forever. Google TV on the other hand runs Android, which opens up plenty of possibilities for interactive experiences.
I wrote an app to play with the idea of interacting with physical music collections through the TV screen. A phone app lets you to scan the barcode of a CD or vinyl record. The TV then displays some information about the record, starts playing the music and brings up the lyrics of the current song.
I didn’t think of it myself, but it was suggested that this kind of setup would be interesting in record shops too.
The phone app talks to the TV using the Anymote protocol. This code for this (especially the Anymote pairing) was based on the open-source Google TV Remote application. The TV part of the app queries a bunch of APIs including MusicBrainz to identify the barcode and metadata, LastFM for the artist image, Amazon for the cover art thumbnail and MusiXmatch for the track lyrics. The music only plays if it’s found on the device. Strangely, I couldn’t find any APIs that wanted to stream music to me…
I almost didn’t present the app because I couldn’t successfully pair the phone and TV after going home to sleep for a few hours. Thankfully, Carl saved the day when he discovered that building the phone app against an older version of Android fixed the pairing issue. This happened half way through the presentations. Just in time.
There is some coverage of the event in TheNextWeb and the Google TV blog. I wish I’d given my team any name other than “I don’t know” now. My personal favourite hack was Luigi and Andrea’s Pongan, which saw the collective participation of most of the audience in a game of Pong.
Roll on the connected home hackathon!
