Code Card 2018

Editor’s note:  Noel is the last man standing from the AppsLab to work at Oracle. He created this project while being part of the Oracle Groundbreakers Team. The rest of the original AppsLab team members are now scattered throughout different companies in the tech sector.

For years I’ve been wanting to create something fun with the almighty esp8266 WiFi chip. I started experimenting with the esp8266 almost exactly four years ago. Back then there was no Arduino, Lua or even MicroPython ports for the chip, only the C Espressif SDK. Today it is fairly easy to write firmware for the ESP given how many documented projects are out there.

IoT Badge by fab-lab.eu

Two years ago I was very close to actually producing something with the esp8266. We, the AppsLab team,  partnered with the Oracle Technology Network team (now known as Oracle Groundbreakers Team) to offer an IoT workshop at Oracle Open World 2016. I reached out to friend-of-the lab Guido Burger from fab-lab.eu and he came up with a clever design for an IoT badge. This badge was the swiss army knife of IoT dev badge/kits.  Unfortunately, we ran out of time to actually mass produce this badge and we had to shelve the idea.

Instead, we decided that year to use an off-the-shelf NodeMcu to introduce attendees to hardware that can talk to the Cloud. For the next year, we updated the IoT workshop curriculum to use the Wio Node board from Seeedstudio.

Fast forward to 2018.  I’ve been following emerging use cases of e-ink screens, and I started experimenting with them. Then the opportunity came.  We needed something to highlight how easy it is to deploy serverless functions with Fn project. Having a physical device that could retrieve content from the cloud and display it was the perfect answer for me.

I reached out to Squarofumi, the creators of Badgy, and we worked together to come up with the right specs for what we ended up calling the Code Card. The Code Card is an IoT badge powered by the esp8266, a rechargeable coin battery, and an e-ink display.

I suggested using the same technique I used to create my smart esp8266 button. When either button A or B are pressed it sets the esp8266 enable pin to high, then the first thing the software does is keep the pin high until we are done doing an HTTP request and updating the e-ink screen.  When we are done, we set the enable pin to low and the chip turns off (not standby). This allows the battery to last much longer.

To make it even easier for busy attendees to get started, I created a web app that was included in the official event app. The Code Card Designer lets you choose from different templates and assign them to a button press (short and long press).

You can also choose an icon from some pre-loaded icons on the firmware. Sadly at the last minute, I had to remove one of the coolest features: the ability to upload your own picture. The feature was just not very reliable and often failed. With more time the feature can be re-introduced.

After attendees used the Code Card designer they were ready for more complex stuff. All they needed to do was connect the Card to their laptops and connect via serial communication. I created a custom Electron Terminal to make it easier to access a custom CLI to change the button endpoints and SSID information.

A serverless function or any other endpoint returning the required JSON is all that is needed to start modifying your Card.

A name and a face! @groundbreakers @Java_Champions @babadopulos #codeone Code Card pic.twitter.com/8tgU228kIi

— Oracle Groundbreakers (@groundbreakers) October 24, 2018

I published the Arduino source code along with other documentation. It didn’t take long for attendees to start messing around with c code array images to change their icons.

Lastly, if you paid attention you can see that we added two Grove headers to connect analog or digital sensors. More fun!

Go check out and clone the whole Github repo. You can prototype your own “badge” using off-the-shelf e-ink board similar to this.

#badgelife!Possibly Related Posts:

• IFTTT Easy Button
• A Smart Badge for a Smart Office
• ESP8266 – Cheap WiFi for your IoT
• For OpenWorld and JavaOne 2016, An Internet of Things Workshop
• IoT Workshop Guide – part 1

The post Making an IoT Badge – #badgelife going corporate first appeared on The AppsLab.

Developing concept products that embrace emerging technologies

Working with emerging technologies brings unique challenges for developers. There are few to no users out there one can ask about requirements.

The AppsLab, the Oracle Applications User Experience (OAUX) emerging technologies team, is a relatively small team of developers, yet the breadth of technologies we investigate is virtually infinite. We must respond quickly to accelerating technological changes.

We also walk the line between what is technically feasible and what is practical for our organization; we have to produce solutions that can be implemented in a reasonable time frame by Oracle’s product development.

Since a traditional development process doesn’t address these challenges, we apply certain techniques to our development process to help us move forward.

Hackathons as a Training Tool

Hackathons spawn lots of ideas, but for us they have an additional benefit. Their frantic pace closely resembles our development process, so we also use hackathons as a training tool. Hackathons are to developers what gyms are to athletes. We participate in them to improve our skills, we serve as mentors to hone our proficiency, and we judge the results to validate our expertise.

They are also a great networking tool for meeting likeminded developers who thrive on the same challenges that we do. We can then share tools and techniques.

Research-Driven Development Process

AppsLab developer Anthony Lai, left, checks out code during a hackathon that featured Raspberry Pi.

Research also plays a big part in our development process. We use it to test our own theories, determine trends, plan our strategic direction, and identify key initiatives to help product development see into the future.

But research doesn’t just drive what we build, it also influences how and when we build. The results of this research identify our requirements and prioritize them but also change them and make us adapt and pivot regularly.

Throughout our build process, we constantly validate our prototypes and products. Whenever we show our evolving prototypes to our research participants, they get new ideas.

As we refine our prototypes and repeatedly present them, study participants may get a clearer picture of possible use cases, which can invalidate previous ones. We actually encourage this behavior; our whole development process is built around constant iteration.

The idea is to iterate and improve the concept quickly or fail quickly.

AppsLab developers Tony Orciuoli, far left, and Mark Vilrokx, right, join OAUX Group Vice President Jeremy Ashley in judging the results of a recent hackathon.

Recycled Development

Although a lot of what we develop may get thrown out at this stage, this is not “throwaway development.” At the very minimum, we learn something, even if it is how not to do something. All of the work gets shelved rather than trashed. It may be reused on other projects or even lead to completely new ideas, so the term “recycled development” is more accurate.

Because we’re focused on emerging technologies, some projects are just too early in the adoption cycle. So the code we write simply waits for the right time.

This is one of the reasons why we are so nimble. We try to reuse as much as we can — and not just our own code.

APIs as the Building Blocks of Rapid Development

Foremost, we focus on the users, not the technologies. Direct, primary research with end users is invaluable and indispensable in producing good user experiences.

Mark demos Oracle Voice, an app that borrows elements from Siri, before it was launched within Oracle Sales Cloud.

We have become adept at using off-the-shelf solutions and combining them with new code to produce prototypes, which often means using other people’s work to launch our own projects.

In software, the most granular off-the-shelf components are APIs. An API is a neatly wrapped functionality that is available to a developer. Instead of having to build something yourself, you can leverage what is already out there for a fee and assemble it any way you see fit. This is analogous to how car manufacturers create cars. They don’t mill steel or build engines, tires, or windscreens; others produce these. The car manufacturer assembles the pieces into a working car. APIs allow you to do the same when building applications.

For example, our team did this type of project with the “Oracle Voice” prototype, a voice-driven virtual assistant for the Oracle Sales Cloud. Its features include speech-to-text, text-to-speech, natural language processing (NLP) and various Oracle Sales Cloud functionalities. Despite the complexity of all of these components, we built a fully working application and put it in front of test subjects for feedback in less than a week.

Email, payments, phone, texts, authentication, and authorization are all available as a service and easily accessible using REST APIs, and more complex APIs are being added, such as facial recognition, image understanding, and machine learning. These allow us to build intelligence into our prototypes quickly and without much effort.

The AppsLab’s Noel Portugal, right, demonstrates smartwatch capabilities.

Show and Tell

Our work is permanently on display in the Cloud UX Lab at Oracle headquarters in Redwood Shores, Calif., and customers pass through almost every day. We also show our products at events across the world, we speak at conferences, we organize and participate in hackathons, we discuss strategy with industry analysts, we host workshops at universities, and we educate Oracle partners.

All these activities provide us with immediate feedback, which is an integral part of our development process. That allows us to continually iterate and adjust the development of our concept products, adding in new emerging technologies and dropping less relevant ideas as they fade on the spectrum of our interests.Possibly Related Posts:

• OAUX Emerging Technologies in Profit Magazine
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• Emphasis on emerging technology shapes user experience strategy
• It’s Been 10 Years

The post Developing concept products that embrace emerging technologies first appeared on The AppsLab.

Designing for What’s Not Yet Here

Designing for emerging technologies means seeing how these technologies can help solve user problems in the enterprise and turn invention into innovation. Because design is somewhere at the intersection of people, technologies, and business, designing for what’s emerging is like solving an equation with three unknowns. What capabilities will the new technologies bring? What users will evolve as adopters? What business models will grow around it?

Three methods help in designing for what’s not yet here: juxtaposition, iteration, and drawing outside the lines.

Juxtaposition is the art of bringing two things from different contexts together to see what kind of chemistry will happen. At the simplest level, a designer might take a recent trend from the consumer space and apply it to an enterprise use case to see what will happen.

For example, we tried applying the experience of using a zoomable mapping app to the project-planning domain. This led to the Project Mapper, an interactive visualization for large projects that lets users see the entire project in two dimensions and then zoom in on details in ways difficult for traditional tools, such as a Gantt Chart.

Complex projects are hard to read on a small screen.

Project Mapper makes the same project easier to follow and lets you zoom in on details.

The final user experience provided not only better access to details but also a global understanding of an overall project, hard to achieve with earlier tools. This is the kind of synergy we look for when using juxtaposition.

Iteration is usually associated with continuous improvement rather than innovation, but we have learned that deep iteration can lead to breakthroughs.

Taking an idea and playing with it, making hundreds of incremental changes with no predetermined goal, can lead to surprising outcomes.

Drawing outside the lines starts by defining the boundaries of a product definition, a task definition, or a user definition. Since those boundaries are almost always fuzzy, we push them just a bit further, adding features not normally seen in such products, gathering more data about the user’s context to simplify the task flow, etc. This method is very helpful in finding sweet spots in the innovation cycle, areas of possibility that are neither self-evident nor too far out.

Here are a few examples of projects that use this method.

The Welcome App was one of Oracle’s first detailed iPad prototypes. It replicated the functionality of the desktop welcome page using tablet paradigms, which seemed unusual at first, including swipeable cards in swim lanes instead of tables and reformatting based on orientation.

The Mountain visualization places a colorful mountain-climber infographic into a sales compensation dashboard. The concise visualization represents a sales representative climbing toward the goal. When the rep exceeds the goal, the climber floats above the summit in a balloon. A team performance view for a manager offers an at-a-glance comparison showing where each individual is.

The Interactive Pipeline took a normal bar chart and turned it upside down to show both gains and losses in staged processes, like sales and recruitment.

We expanded the “Glance” smartwatch project definition (to display enterprise notifications on a watch) to include context such as schedule, location, and priorities. The goal was to ensure that only timely and important notifications would show up on the watch.

The goal in user experience design with emerging technologies is always to find early indications of new techniques and technologies that may prove useful to Oracle’s enterprise customers. As computing pioneer Alan Kay famously observed, the best way to predict the future is to invent it.

These efforts at invention are always grounded and guided by an understanding of the users. We work closely with researchers on the team to better understand the challenges that Oracle customers face. We test early concepts in focus groups, test prototypes, and continue testing throughout the design process.

All of our projects start, continue, and end with user research.

That way, prototyping and development are also inseparable from our design process. An act of building out an idea into a visible, tangible form brings up all of the details that the mind had overlooked, be they feasibility, design, or usability. For more on that, read the next article.Possibly Related Posts:

• Emphasis on emerging technology shapes user experience strategy
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• OAUX Tidbits
• Emerging Technologies and the ‘Glance, Scan, Commit’ Design Philosophy
• New Content on Our Oracle.com Page

The post Designing for What’s Not Yet Here first appeared on The AppsLab.

What do you do when you don’t have users yet?

Oracle’s approach to researching emerging technologies isn’t really about the technology; it’s about the users: observing, listening, empathizing, and learning about our users and what matters to them.

These insights allow us to build applications that address their needs and to design the best user experiences.

But doing the research for emerging technology can sometimes be difficult. What if you don’t have any users yet because the technology is too new, or what if it’s so new that you can’t even get your hands on the technology yourself?

As part of the AppsLab, the Oracle Applications User Experience (OAUX) emerging technology team, we approach research with two general questions:

1. Who is the user? Answering this leads us to the most important user tasks and workflows to improve upon and the pain points that need solving. We work to understand users holistically, focusing on functionality that would be most beneficial and designing solutions suited to our users’ goals, natural instincts and behavior, and situational context.

2. How can a new technology help this user? We want to create indispensable applications with exceptional user experiences, not just make something for the sake of using an emerging technology. As technology advances, we look at how to improve our applications with that new technology or trend. We study new devices, gadgets, and trends to understand their capabilities as well as how they could benefit our users. There’s no point in making an Apple Watch app for a task that users would rather do on their smartphones.

Users are invited to try out different technologies during lab tours at Oracle headquarters. This man is using a Sphero headset that reads his brain waves as he tries to move an app-enabled robotic ball through a maze.

Knowledge of our users combined with insights into emerging technologies allows us to anticipate our users’ needs and how they expect to interact with technology.

But getting back to those inherent challenges:

There may be no users yet. If there are users, chances are they’re early adopters, who are unlikely to be representative of the general and future user population.

Rather than be discouraged by potential pitfalls, we focus on what we can do and learn as much as we can. We observe and speak to the users (whomever they may be), learn what attracted them to the technology, learn why and how they are using it, and discuss their expectations, frustrations, and satisfaction with the experience.

We combine the findings with our core knowledge of our users and then infer possible areas of product improvement, leveraging or extending the new technology we’re investigating.

There may be no product yet. Commonly, emerging technologies are not readily available and might be expensive. Consequently, few people have direct, hands-on experience to speak about, and we have a hard time finding users to study.

Instead, we bring the new technology to the users, which allow us to gather their first impressions and see their early interactions, learning in the process about any discoverability or learnability issues with that technology. We converse with them about product desirability and potential value, brainstorm potential use cases, and identify barriers to adoption.

Exploring new approaches

We try different research methods to study users and emerging technologies and use the data we gather to guide our design and development direction.

In contrast to standard usability testing, which comprises much of enterprise user research, we have been expanding our research methodologies to best answer our questions about emerging technologies. The standard methods work well for iterating on existing products, but exploring new technologies requires other approaches.

With this new research push, we’ve chosen to focus on four methodological characteristics:

• Natural: How do users interact with technology in their normal lives as opposed to in a lab?
• Quick: Gathering data to form insights in a timely manner, appropriate to the pace of innovation.
• Volume: Having more data allows for broader conclusions and deeper insights.
• Longitudinal: Following users to learn how their interactions with technologies change over time.

There are many research methods to choose from, ranging from qualitative to quantitative, attitudinal to behavioral. But the key is to constantly ask questions about the user and the technology.

For example, we’ve been conducting what we call guerrilla usability studies, in which we bring a cool new gadget or technology to an Oracle user conference and spontaneously recruit people to play with it in exchange for answering some of our questions. With this tactic, we often can talk to 25-40 users during the course of two or three days at a conference. These kinds of studies are a great way to quickly get a much higher volume of participants than usual.

Guido Schauer, a member of the AppsLab team, demonstrates how to wear this virtual reality headset.

At the Oracle Modern Supply Chain Experience in San Jose, Calif., in early 2016, we took the Samsung Gear VR headset and gathered impressions of and use cases for virtual reality in the enterprise.

Another technique we’ve used recently is a journal study, in which we interviewed and collected daily survey data from Apple Watch users so that we could get a better sense of how they use their devices in real life, how it helps them with their work, and what they want to be able to do with a smartwatch. This kind of study captures natural usage patterns longitudinally — over the course of a month, we can see how things are changing instead of getting a single snapshot in time.

We also use Oracle’s Social Relationship Management (SRM) tool to follow trends and emerging technologies across social media, blogs, and other Internet content.

With SRM, we’re able to capture the pulse of attitudes around the globe.

Focusing in the right place

Foremost, we focus on the users, not the technologies. Direct, primary research with end users is invaluable and indispensable in producing good user experiences.

Our range of research activities informs our knowledge of the user, enables the entire product team to understand and empathize with the user, and fuels our creativity to produce novel solutions with the latest technologies to serve the user.

This image shows a collection of Apple Watch faces shared by participants in a recent study, which gave a glimpse into how they use smartwatches in the real world.

• Heading ‘into the wild’ for guerilla research on emerging tech
• Emphasis on emerging technology shapes user experience strategy
• Guerrilla Testing at OHUG
• Emerging Technologies and the ‘Glance, Scan, Commit’ Design Philosophy
• Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne 2014 Cometh

The post User Research at the Forefront of Technology first appeared on The AppsLab.

Playing at work promotes discovery, opens door to innovation

What if work could also be play? It turns out that it’s both better for the worker and for the work. As such, it’s something the Oracle Applications User Experience (OAUX) team tries to incorporate into its research on emerging technologies.

We all enjoy play—it’s fun. When we’re playing, the activity itself is its own reward, not money or some other external reward. We play for the sake of playing, not because we were told to.

But how can work become play? It tends to happen when people are allowed to explore and experiment in a self-guided way.

There’s just one problem: Play gets a bad rap. Lloyd P. Rieber of the University of Georgia says in a report on play there is “a sense of risk attached to suggesting an adult is at play. Work is respectable; play is not.”

There is a tendency to define play as the opposite of work, but that’s not the case. Rieber also explains, “Work becomes play when one’s job is so satisfying and rewarding that getting paid to do it is of secondary importance.”

Visitors to the OAUX Cloud Labs at Oracle Headquarters in Redwood City, Calif., get a chance to play with the emerging technology that’s been part of our user experience research.

Play and work don’t have to be at odds with each other; the best kind of work is also play.

Embracing a spirit of discovery

This relationship between work and play is something we’ve taken advantage of in Oracle’s emerging technologies team, the AppsLab. We encourage playing with new technologies to learn what they’re capable of, and creating demos that speak to that spirit of discovery and exploration.

The OAUX team’s research and experiments help to generate better ideas, allowing Oracle as a company to encourage innovation by promoting different ways of working, and to take a risk by allowing the exploration of new, and maybe a little wild, ideas.

This approach to innovation — and also to user experience design — is the charter of OAUX. “Play is essential in design because it allows an individual to understand why things are, and how they could be,” Jeremy Ashley, OAUX Group Vice President, said.

Playing, in this sense, is deeply tied to exploration—gaining knowledge about how these technologies work in the first place, and then how they can best serve our users and fit into the world of Oracle software.

This exploration usually involves building a prototype—it starts with learning about the code, and then leads to investigating the user experience of a new technology.

A play-oriented approach to emerging technology engages even younger audiences considering careers in IT, from the Girl Scouts to Oracle’s Design Tech High School.

It also solves a problem encountered when researching emerging technologies: often there aren’t many users for the technologies we are investigating.

Recycled development

For example, when Google Glass first came out, very few people had access to the device, given its limited release and high cost.

We were fortunate to have someone on the team who was a Glass Explorer, and he quickly built an Oracle Sales Cloud application to show on the Glass.

When we showed Google Glass to users, not only did we show our prototype, we were also able to see how people used the device, what they wanted to do with it, and what they thought about it.

We didn’t have any existing users, but we used the opportunity to learn from their initial impressions.

The fun demo, and moving faster

OAUX team member Anthony Lai demonstrates how Google Glass works.

Over the years, we have used this challenge with emerging technologies as an opportunity to create new, faster research methods. Enter the fun demo.

We use the fun demo as an engaging way for people to experience a device or interaction paradigm that is likely new to them.

For example, when the Leap Motion—a gestural input device that detects what your hands are doing from a distance—first came out, our team “played” with the technology by using it to control a robot arm. We’ve since demoed this to hundreds of customers and visitors to the OAUX Cloud Labs, and it consistently impresses, because it’s a fun way to use gesture technology. They often want to play with it themselves.

We have since used the Leap Motion in our Smart Office, a demo showcasing our vision for the office of the future, but that initial play showed us the device’s capabilities and limitations. It taught us what Leap Motion is good for, and where it would fall short. This is critical, because the play phase is informing us when it comes time to build the real-world use cases that our customers require.

If we didn’t invest that time in playing with the technology, we wouldn’t be as familiar or capable with it.

The Leap Motion-controlled robot arm is only one of many fun demos we’ve done:

• Using text messages to control Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots
• Sending tweets by hitting an IoT-enabled target with a flying monkey
• Controlling a Sphero robotic ball with your brainwaves
• Shooting a Nerf gun using IoT
• Racing Anki cars using arm gestures
• Playing a virtual game by playing with things in the real world

Each demo targets a specific emerging technology for which we wanted research and input.

Fun is key to the fun demo. As people enjoy themselves using a particular device, they tend to think about it with respect to what they know. These are Oracle’s users, each of whom has experience with our software and has domain expertise in areas like Human Capital Management (HCM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), or Financials.

OAUX team member Noel Portugal, left, shows the robot arm, which allows the crowd to use gestures to interact with a computer.

As their minds open to this new device, they begin to talk about how it could be used to improve their work, create efficiencies, and do new tasks.

In our experience, this happens more organically using the fun demo than if you merely asked the same people to think about how a new device would be helpful to their work.

The difference is fun, and this is how we collect some of our best research.Possibly Related Posts:

• It’s Been 10 Years
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• Heading ‘into the wild’ for guerilla research on emerging tech
• Find Us at Kscope14 Next Week in Seattle

The post Playing at work promotes discovery, opens door to innovation first appeared on The AppsLab.

Emphasis on emerging technology shapes user experience strategy

The AppsLab, the OAUX emerging technologies team, has a passion for investigating how emerging interactions and technologies can benefit Oracle users.

While this team has existed for many years, Oracle recently increased its investment in forward-looking innovation. We look exclusively at new and emerging technologies, such as wearables and Internet of Things (IoT), to understand how they work and how they might influence the user experience of enterprise software someday.

By dedicating a team to emerging technologies, we can accelerate our rate of innovation in the Oracle user experience and drive the evolution of Oracle Cloud Applications forward.

Innovation plays an important role on our team. Jeremy Ashley, Group Vice President of the Oracle Applications User Experience (OAUX) group, describes innovation as a process of constant refinement.

“Innovation, in its purest form, is to make something better,” he said. “It takes work – observation, understanding, the ability to see what is important about something.” Innovation comes from two sources, he said: new technology or materials in which we can see opportunities, and the ability to research and identify a pattern or trend that gives us insight, which we then leverage to design and build something interesting and useful.

If you’re wondering why Oracle invests heavily in such forward-looking work, think about the tablet. Remember back to when the original iPad was released in 2010. Lots of smart people scoffed at “the big iPod” with the humorous name.

Fast-forward to the present, and think about the devices you use every day. Odds are there’s a tablet in your life, and when tablets came out, we did the research, built some representative demos, and showed those demos to users.

We collected feedback, and when the time was right, we already had code and research to show. We were ready to add this new innovation into the Oracle user experience, even before its use became widespread.

We study new technology and materials and look for opportunities for innovation in the user experience.

The spread of innovation

Consider the diffusion of innovations theory offered by communication scholar Everett Rogers in the 1960s.

Rogers models the spread of an innovation through any given populace over time, juxtaposed with the innovation’s market share. He breaks the populace into five groups: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards.

Think about the innovations of the past 20 years. We?ve seen the meteoric rise of technologies we now use every day, like the Internet, ecommerce, mobile phones, smartphones, and social networks. For every technology, there have been groups of early adopters and laggards and those who are in between.

As these technologies take root, the time it takes for each new technology to gain mass adoption continues to compress, causing innovations to spread much more quickly.

For example, it took the better part of a decade for Internet access to become a ubiquitous utility for every business. Fast-forward a bit and think about the same timespan for smartphones as a must-have for work.

How long did that take, maybe five years? What about the next new tool, technology or device that allows users to be more productive? Whatever it is, it’s already in the workplace, making jobs easier and making people more efficient.

People bring their expectations of technology to the workplace. Sales representatives think their applications should be easy, like Instagram. Employees working in finance think General Ledger needs an iPad app with animated reports. Human resources workers want an employee directory for their smartwatches. The core message we hear from users again and again is that they want – even expect – their work experiences to be on par with their consumer experiences.

This is where the emerging technologies team fits into the user experience work. We investigate new technologies because someday soon, our users will want to use them at work.

Simply put, innovations make our experiences better. So naturally, users want better experiences everywhere – at work, at home, in the car, on airplanes, in space, underwater – everywhere.

Where does Oracle invest?

Successful adoption of new technology relies heavily on:

• Timing
• Use cases that trigger user empathy or pain points
• Neutral and trusted advocates

Innovators and early adopters are frequently relied on to identify emerging technologies and evaluate their impact. They advise decision-makers and are viewed as experts.

We focus on what innovators and early adopters are also investigating, which allows us to find common ground and convert them into advocates. This helps drive adoption and seeds demand in their spheres of influence.

We’ve realized innovations that have spread to the early adopter group will produce the most bang for our buck. These are projects that aren’t too far-fetched but aren’t yet completely tactical and incremental enhancements.

That’s not to say we don’t do mad-scientist explorations, a.k.a. “moonshots.” We do those, too, just not very many. Typically, moonshot innovations won’t affect users for years, but when they do, we’ll be prepared and informed. For example, we’ve been messing around with technologies like head-mounted displays, augmented reality, gestural interfaces, and drones.

We also do tactical projects, or incremental improvements that users know they want right now. These might include improvements to how interview evaluations are completed or geo-fencing data to meet security requirements.

Learn more

Now that you know what we do and why, here’s how you can learn more about how we operate.

Read about our methodologies:

• User-centric research
• Thoughtful design
• Rapid development iterations

Possibly Related Posts:

• User Research at the Forefront of Technology
• Heading ‘into the wild’ for guerilla research on emerging tech
• It’s Been 10 Years
• Come Visit the OAUX Gadget Lab
• Emerging Technologies and the ‘Glance, Scan, Commit’ Design Philosophy

The post Emphasis on emerging technology shapes user experience strategy first appeared on The AppsLab.

Noel and I decided to keep this blog running, both as a historical resume of sorts and as a way for all of us who worked in ‘Lab over the years to share our ongoing adventures and talk about technology.

We had a good run, thanks to executive leaders like Paul and Jeremy, and I will always remember the camaraderie we had as a team. I’d be hard-pressed to assemble a group like the one we had, and I hope someday to reassemble us, even if it’s just over a meal.

Not much else to say. I hope everyone will continue to post here about new adventures, new technologies, burning questions and really anything.

Good luck everyone and thank you for reading.Possibly Related Posts:

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The post Epilogue first appeared on The AppsLab.

The original Gear VR in 2014. Feels so ancient

Along the way, we have researched on enterprise VR use cases, device platform, and development technologies. We created virtual gadget lab as soon as A-Frame (WebVR) made first release; and then tried to capture Oracle offices around different continents in 360 views to create a virtual office tour, in both A-Frame build for delivering over the Internet, and Unity built on Oculus Rift for better immersion in the Gadget lab at Oracle HQ. We discussed about  virtual “First day at Oracle” as HCM Onboarding demo use case. And finally, we captured 2017 OAUX Exchange event in VR, where you can wander around the conference stations and watch the video presentation.

Comparing to the hyper activities in VR, the AR space was relatively quiet in past years, without major devices or development platform support. Project Tango provided earlier peek, followed by Microsoft releasing its Hololens headset, with development platform support such as Unity plugin. We also played with Holocube from Merge Cube, which provides a sense of you holding a virtual object in your hand.  And now, with AR support built-in on mobile devices such as Android phones and iPhone,  it seems that the time is finally coming to build compelling AR use cases that can be showcased on readily available devices.

Being one of the first well-built AR headsets, Hololens brought the AR to main focus

During our research on AR/VR, we concluded that AR has much broader applications in enterprise environment, where VR is more suited to entertainment and gaming. We will investigate and prototype AR use cases as main focus this year.

I have been looking into ARKit and Unity/Vuforia development platform, to address the elements of making an AR application.

1.  trigger mechanism – to recognize environment and objects

There are two big categories of marker based, and markerless approach to trigger something happen. Pokemon Go is an example of markerless AR which is mostly based on GPS to determine what Pokemons are in the surrounding. While for many of indoor or limited space environment, marker based approach may provide more “spot-on” triggering and anchoring.  Any identifiable thing can be a marker,  from simple QR sticker, printed-out image, to a rigid object having been scanned and registered, or object recognized by trained ML/AI model.

I just finished exploring the image marker with Unity/Vuforia last week, and heard the passing of the great mind Stephen Hawking, so I made a VR video to bid farewell and send him off to the journey of Universe.

2. anchor point – to overlay contextual virtual content in real surrounding

When we detect a marker or object, we need to position a corresponding virtual object in surrounding environment, so that it fits nicely. For example, display nutrition information next to a food item, or overlay a internal view of machinery on top of that exact machine location (called superimposition). It is not always easy to anchor a virtual object onto physical environment at development time, as this photos showing the misalignment in final rendering.

Toy Jeep with virtual car – misaligned anchor point

In this case, end user should be able to move around the virtual objects to make them fitting better to the surroundings. That involves the end user interaction and changes the anchor point of virtual objects into the real environment.

3. human interaction

In addition to look at Augmented Reality environment where virtual objects blends into real surrounding, end users may try to interact with virtual objects in the scene, such as moving around virtual furniture, or even operating an equipment. This type of interaction is very close to game development, which  the game platform/engine such as Unity comes in handy.

We are ready to create our first AR prototype for an enterprise setup, likely settling on Unity with Vuforia plugin, for the advantages of making builds for Android, iOS and potentially Hololens. Unity also makes virtual environment creation and object interaction much easier because of the effects and physics from its game engine.

Here is our latest prototype without art work yet

We will post updates once we completed the prototype.Possibly Related Posts:

• Mixed Reality Demo – The Physical Parts
• What If Enterprise Software Were Produced?
• GDC 2016 – Part 2: The State of VR
• Watch-First Design and Development
• GDC 2017: A Push toward Ethical & Accessible Alternate Realities

The post Exploring AR first appeared on The AppsLab.

Recently, at Oracle CloudWorld in New York, Oracle President Thomas Kurian talked about how emerging technologies can change the way you do your job for the better.

Investigating this impact is the primary focus of the AppsLab, the Oracle Applications User Experience (OAUX) Emerging Tech team, and it is what my team and I explore every day.

A recent post on Forbes.com, “3 Examples Of How Emerging Tech Will Change Your Work,” examined three specific ways emerging technology could be incorporated into enterprises. In this post, we’re going to tell you about the research we’ve done on a few of those technologies, specifically artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous experiences, ambient interfaces, and the Internet of Things (IoT), and discuss our findings on how these technologies might affect your work and improve your user experience.

Artificial intelligence

The term AI covers a lot of territory, but generally speaking, it refers to intelligence demonstrated by machines. Like many people, we’re also fascinated by the efficiencies AI could produce in the workplace. Rather than building a giant artificial brain, we’ve decided to start smaller — with chatbots.

We began thinking about ways to automate tasks using bots in 2010, but we didn’t begin developing exploratory projects in earnest until late 2015. As with most of our projects, we started by asking questions and researching ways people thought chatbots could help them do their jobs more efficiently.

By OpenWorld 2016 we had a working prototype, just in time for the big announcement of the Oracle Intelligent Bot Cloud Service. Our chatbot focused on tasks that Oracle Cloud Applications users wanted to streamline, such as simple human resources (HR) tasks like payroll and vacation queries that could be performed in applications already familiar to the user, using tools they already know how to use such as text and instant messaging.

We continue to gather research by showing chatbots in the Cloud UX Labs at Oracle HQ, and we now have several bots for different domains within Cloud Applications, including HCM, Sales, and ERP Cloud.

The feedback from people who see these chatbot demos typically is very positive; they can easily see the value of texting a chatbot with a simple inquiry like, “Did I get paid my bonus?” or a more complex one like, “Can I take vacation this Easter?” Getting instant answers to questions like these creates a valuable efficiency that resonates with all Oracle users.

Autonomous experiences

Through our research on chatbots, we discovered many cases where the AI we were building could save time by making basic assumptions for a user and automatically composing something in the system.

At Oracle OpenWorld 2017 last September in San Francisco, we demonstrated an expense bot. Usually, expense reports require a fair amount of manual work, but we found simple ways to automate the process.

For example, the demo shows the bot automatically uploading and parsing pictures of receipts. It then determines the amount of the expense and the time of day, makes an assumption on the type of expense, and creates an expense report. Several steps in creating such a report are now automated.

Another feature of the expense bot monitors the user’s email inbox for pdf receipts, such as hotel folios or rental car receipts, then uploads and parses them to itemize and categorize the expenses automatically.

This was all done via a chatbot that simply notified the user when expense items were created and ready for use. When the user was ready, an expense report was created and submitted.

We also built in an option where, if any policy violations occurred on the expense report, the user could login to ERP Cloud to review and rectify them.

No one likes doing expenses, so people who see this demo are happy to offload the pain to a chatbot. Plus, we found new insights that can be valuable, such as automatic itemization of hotel folios, which allows for local tax comparisons that could lead to savings.

Ambient interfaces

For several years, ambient interfaces have interested us. At CloudWorld, Kurian referred to “ambient human interfaces” as virtual assistants that users interact with by voice.

Our investigations into ambient interfaces have included virtual assistants, as described in the previous sections, but we also view them as the next iteration of smartphone notifications, passively showing only the most important information.

At Oracle OpenWorld 2016, we showed an ambient visualization; the original goal was to create a piece of art that changed based on information gathered from the room. Anyone who understood why the visualization changed could get real-time data on where people were in the room, but to everyone else, it was just a piece of dynamic art.

As with many of our projects, this was a research initiative. By giving an example of what we meant by an ambient interface, people could apply their own knowledge to give us valuable examples of how this type of interface would help them with their work.

Internet of Things

The connected world around us has been an area of personal interest for our team for nearly a decade, and a few of our team members have been building internet-connected projects at home since before the term Internet of Things (IoT) was coined.

This long history has led to several IoT projects, including a real-world Smart Office in our lab at Oracle’s headquarters in Redwood Shores, Calif., and its portable equivalent that has been shown around the world. We also developed an IoT-based Community Quest with Oracle Developers at OpenWorld 2015, and our IoT workshops have been part of Oracle Code events since the program began in 2017. And at last year’s OpenWorld, we collaborated with the Oracle IoT Cloud Service team, Oracle Developers, Relayr, an Oracle partner, and Alpha Acid Brewing Company to create IoT Cloud Brewed Beer.

Our focus recently has been on making the sensor-filled environments around us more valuable. Now that physical spaces and objects are collecting data, what efficiencies can we uncover in that data to benefit our work? As always, we’ll be conducting research first, asking questions, and listening to people.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Heading ‘into the wild’ for guerilla research on emerging tech
• Come Visit the OAUX Gadget Lab
• OAUX Emerging Technologies in Profit Magazine
• Emerging Technologies and the ‘Glance, Scan, Commit’ Design Philosophy
• The Future of Work: What does a Smart Office look like today?

The post Research on Emerging Tech Like AI, IoT Aims to Make Your Work More Efficient first appeared on The AppsLab.

I had never given a thought about shoe treads until, a week earlier, a woman on the NodeBox forum asked for help creating organic shoe patterns. I asked her to elaborate on what she meant by “organic” and she sent me a photograph that looked like a school of hexagon fish swimming in the shape of a shoe, with bigger fish in the center and smaller fish near the edges.

An organic-looking shoe tread design

I looked into it and discovered a vast art form that had been right under my feet the whole time. There are entire schools which teach shoe tread design and thousands of designs hitting the pavement every day, each one unique. If you doubt me, go to this Pinterest page and start scrolling. Scroll some more. Getting tired yet? Keep scrolling. Amazing, isn’t it?

Redrawing a particular pattern wouldn’t be too hard; you could just trace over a photograph. But generating new vector-based patterns from scratch is not as easy. You would need to develop a whole language of core concepts (nodes) that could follow the sinuous curve of an arch, adapt to edges, grow and shrink based on position, soften sharp edges, etc. These are things which children can do instinctively, but which require significant math for computers.

That is the problem which hooked me. It’s a problem I’ve run into before. Visualizations are powerful because the human visual system is powerful. Resolving a scene into component shapes, tracing edges, comparing areas, etc. is effortless for us – we do most of it subconsciously. I often get ideas for rendering data as shapes or lines that are easy to sketch on paper, but hard to codify into algorithms.

To illustrate this, I have identified six simple visual tasks that are easy for children but surprisingly tricky to do in NodeBox. Over the course of my two-week passion project I was able to develop a “node” for each one – and then used them to draw a few simple tread designs.

1. Finding the outside

Visual Task Number 1

Given a set of objects (shapes, words, dots) arranged on a 2D canvas, it is often useful to draw a border that efficiency encloses the objects. Uses include highlighting one clump of related points in a larger scattergram, drawing “word clouds” that surround a set of words, etc. To do this you have to figure out which positions are the outside of the clump and which are inside. A child can do this just by looking, but how does a computer do it?

The mathematical term for this is convex hull. It is considered one of the fundamental problems of computational geometry. The difficulty of finding a convex hull increases with the number of points to be enclosed. There are a number of known algorithms, each with its own tradeoffs. I used Andrew’s Monotone Chain.

I now have a “wrap” node. Feed it a list of points and it returns the subset of exterior points arranged in clockwise order. You can feed that output into a connect node to draw a line that wraps all the objects and then into a scale node to create some breathing room.

2. Softening Corners

Visual Task Numbe 2

A key requirement in making “organic” shapes is the ability to soften corners. You need to replace sharp corners with gentle curves and control the amount of “curviness”. This turns out to be a hard problem. The shapes I want to deal with are “Bsplines”, sequences of bezier curves. In order to turn a pointy shape into a rounded shape, you need to replace line segments with Bsplines and find the control points of each bezier curve in the sequence.

Fortunately, I found an algorithm by Bernhard R. Fischer that does exactly that. It involves finding the tangent of each corner and extending control points along that tangent (the farther you go, the curvier it gets). I created a NodeBox node (subnetwork) called fit_curve that does all this. It’s not perfect, but it works well enough, and has become one of the most useful tools in my toolbox.

3. Finding Areas

Visual Task Number 3

A persistent problem I ran into when I began trying to draw shoe soles was dust. (I encountered the same phenomenon when working with maps.) “Dust” refers to shapes created during complex intersection operations that are often  too tiny to see with the naked eye. Dust particles can be so small that they cannot be softened and so screw up my calculations. To get rid of them I needed to delete all shapes below a certain area.

But how do you calculate the area of random curvy shapes? Even calculus does not help much with this. The solution I came up with was to reduce the shape to a polygon and apply a centuries-old surveyor’s method called the shoelace formula. It involves taking cross-products of alternating X and Y positions in a back-and-forth way like tying a shoelace. Problem solved.

4. Tracing Edges

Visual Task Number 4

Children love tracing edges. Start with a few simple shapes and draw outlines around each one. Then draw outlines around the outlines until they start to intersect. The result is psychedelic. A similar process is useful in creating topographic maps and sea-charts.

By now you will not be surprised to hear that this is another hard problem for computers. A popular library for doing curve offsets requires more than three thousand lines of code. In fact, it is mathematically impossible to offset one bezier curve from another. The solution is to break the curve down into tiny line segments, calculate the tangent of each one, and use that information (plus my fit_curve node) to create a new curve. I can now trace the inside of a shoe sole with ease.

5. Magnifying a Grid

Visual Task Number 5

A basic component of shoe tread patterns is intersecting lines or curves. But for that organic bigger-in-the-center, smaller-near-the-edges look, I needed a way to magnify these grids so that the center cell is enlarged, the grid cells around that are proportionally smaller, the grid cells around those are smaller still, and so forth.

The effect looks simple and natural, but calculating the exact positions of each intersecting line in a way that shrinks distances around the center in a consistently proportional way while at the same time conserving the number of lines and maintaining a fixed outer boundary is, well, tricky. I derived a nasty-looking formula to represent this, but my calculus skills were too rusty to integrate it. I finally had to turn to a messy numerical method.

There may be a simpler way of doing this that I could not see, but my accordion node works well enough for now. It’s also handy for creating natural-looking animations like a fan folding and unfolding.

6. Seeing Shapes

Visual Task Number 6

The final challenge was the most fundamental and goes to the heart of what makes our human visual system so magical. When presented with an array of intersecting lines, circles, etc. people instantly and effortlessly perceive the intersections as independent shapes. They can point to them, number them, and color them without a second thought.

But to a computer there are no shapes there. It takes a lot of extra work to calculate all the positions lines or circles intersect and figure out which subsets of those intersections could form the outline of new shapes.

This is what my fragment node now does. Feed it a boundary and a pattern of intersecting lines or curves and it returns a list of all the independent shapes formed as a result (minus the dust). If I feed it the three intersecting circles of a Venn diagram it will return all eight intersection shapes (including the shape outside the three circles).

With the toolbox I developed over the course of my two-week “passion project” I can now trace the inside of the sole to define a canvas, apply a grid of curves to it, magnify that grid, pull out the resulting shapes, and soften them. I was only able to create a few simple proof of concept tread designs in the allotted time, but am now confident I could produce many more. Perhaps this will be a retirement project for me some day. In the meantime, I have already used some of these tools to create new visualizations at work.

NodeBox screenshot showing some of my tread designs

Passion projects like this may seem frivolous, but I’ve always found them an essential part of innovation. I have my own name for them: PONARVs: Projects Of No Apparent Redeeming Value.

Stone Soup

In the classic Grimm Brothers tale, returning soldiers convince selfish villagers to share their food by telling them they are making “stone soup”. They place a stone in a pot of water and start it boiling. One by one they get each suspicious villager to add an apparently inconsequential ingredient until a flavorful soup comes together that is more than the sum of its parts.

My shoe soles project was like making stone soup. The shoe problem was the stone that defined the soup. But in the process of making it, I was forced to add one tasty node “ingredient” after another. In the end I created something much more wonderful – and useful – than shoe treads.Possibly Related Posts:

• NodeBox
• Search by Drawing with Google Correlate
• Fun With Facebook
• Our Real Time Ambient Display at OpenWorld
• Controlling NodeBox from an Apple Watch

The post Shoe Treads first appeared on The AppsLab.

Oracle hosted its first Girl Geek Dinner last Thursday, December 7, 2017. The dinner was 18 months in the making. With at least 400 women and men in attendance, it is the largest Girl Geek Dinner of the year.

The Bay Area chapter of Girl Geek Dinners have been hosted at 100+ Silicon Valley tech companies, since Google hosted the first event of 400+ women in tech in 2008. The community which attend these events are generally interested in learning about new technology, meeting other women in tech, and hearing fellow girl geeks share thought leadership in areas of STEM as well as career advice onstage. These dinners are meant to connect women across companies large and small for networking and recruiting.

The premise is simple. The host company buys dinner and drinks for the girl geeks. Female speakers are invited to speak in their area of expertise. Networking amongst the girl geeks and recruiting by the host company is encouraged. All attendees leave with a co-branded gift to extend the lifetime of the event.

Leor Chechick of Oracle Women’s Leadership group (OWL) invited Thao Nguyen and I to join the planning committee 5 months before the day of the event.

Sukrutha, Angie and Leor welcome the crowd.

We had grand plans for the event. It was our first Oracle Girl Geek Dinner and we wanted to run top speed right out of the gate! This meant hosting 400+ girl geeks, commissioning an Oracle x Girl Geek cake, inviting very smart and articulate Oracle women speakers, showing exciting demos, and giving lots and lots of co-branded swag.

Oracle cake by Bakery 300! They did a great job making the Oracle boat and building out of fondant.

Port wine with Valrhona truffles.

Gift bags and gifts bags! The building you see outside the window is the D.Tech High school.

The planning committee was in need of a designer to create the co-branded logo for our promotion pieces. User researchers don’t do much design work and so I jumped at the opportunity to learn Sketch and logo work (Illustrator is still best if you want to create print design and use PSD mockups). Here were the wants and needs:

• Adhere to the Oracle branding guidelines
• Emphasize the Oracle first, OWL second.
• Customize the Girl Geek Dinner logo with an Oracle theme or mascot.

Looking through co-branded artwork from past Girl Geek Dinner events, I decided on substitute the girl in the bay area girl geek logo for an owl to represent our Oracle Women Lead. This way we can keep the ORACLE logo on top.

Variation of logo in the cloud to put on our volunteer t-shirts.

In high school, I designed and manually screened T-shirts as part of an entrepreneurship course that gives students a hands-on experience running a business. It was exciting to revisit that part of my life when I was asked to create the t-shirt and tank top designs as well as the signage!

Front of shirts. Our Oracle volunteers are checking in girl geeks. Every girl geek gets a passport with their name tags and a gift bag!

Back of the shirts. Girl geeks are walking around the demo area and learning more about Oracle Student Cloud.

Here is a picture of some of the signage:

The Emerging Technologies Team ran two fun demos at the event: Dueling IoT Wands and Gesture Controlled Robot Arm. Both demos highlighted our investment into research and development by building and experimenting with new consumer and enterprise technologies. Thao did a great job wrangling the demos together and connecting Leor to the right people to ensure the best set-up possible.

Tanya (left) and I dueled. She won!

Raymond and I making sure that the duel plays smoothly. No running and hitting please!

Raymond Xie and I manned the Dueling with IoT Wands table. About 40 rounds were played the the girl geeks within the 90 minutes we had with them.

Shannon and Mark are explaining how they built the robot arm.

Mark explaining how to play. Simply use hand gestures to control the robot arm. Pick up a 3D printed letter and drop it into a red cup.

Mark Vilrokx, Shannon Whiteman and Thao Nguyen manned the Gesture Controlled Robot Arm. We demonstrated how remote surgery is very very far from being a reality. This was by far the most popular demo at the event. Crowds formed around the table as girl geeks cheered each other on.

Every girl geek received a stamp as a thank you for coming to our demo table. As another thank you, the girl geeks received a black tank top for visiting at least two demo tables.

We had passports as name tags. Girl Geeks get a stamp at each demo they visit. When they get 2 stamps, they get a co-branded tank top!

And here is the front of the passport:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BccnL8VFA-L/?tagged=oraclegirlgeekdinner

Missed out on the Oracle Girl Geek Dinner? Check out the video below courtesy of Alexa Weber Morales

 Possibly Related Posts:

• Find Us at Oracle Code
• Magical Links for a Tuesday in December
• The April That Was and Our Plans for May and June
• Celebrating 5 Years in Oracle’s Mexico Development Center
• Modern CX 2016

The post Oracle x Girl Geek Dinner definitely does compute first appeared on The AppsLab.

From the first day I got the Amazon Echo in December 2014 I looked for more interesting ways to interact with it. Before the Alexa team released an official API, I came up with a rather creative way to control things . It was not perfect since I had to add things to the “todo” list and then poll private APIs for changes. A few months later the official API came and things have been much smoother since, but there is one feature that some people like me would really like: True push voice notifications.

The Alexa team announced push notifications this year (2017). There are a few select skills out there (i.e. The Washington Post,  AccuWeather) that have implemented push notifications as beta releases. I have also (privately) played with the push notification API, but the execution and experience in my opinion is rather underwhelming. It seems apparent that the Alexa team (or perhaps some other powerful voices) are highly opposed to a true “you’ve got mail” style notification. Instead the current Alexa push notification consists of an “answering machine” model: the ring turns yellow with a subtle chime then you ask Alexa if you miss anything.

There have been some great geeky attempts to do real voice push notifications. Guillermo Amaral hacked the Echo’s remote control with a Raspberry Pi emulating the push of the talk button. Then using cron jobs and eSpeak commands (linux version of ‘say’ macOS command) he triggers Alexa by sending, “Alexa, Simon says: You have a meeting.” The results are pretty good. Another great hack was done by friend of the Lab and colleague John Graves. He uses speech synthesis as well, but using Alexa’s own Voice Service. Then using a Bluetooth paired computer (or Raspberry Pi) he plays the text-to-speech results.

Now, three years after my first Amazon Echo hack, I came up with another one! This time I also use the private APIs that the Echo uses to create reminders which in turn will play a spoken notification. The result is not quite perfect since every notification begins with: “This is a reminder.” You can schedule reminders or notifications for future times or you can deliver them immediately.

I insist that there are great use cases for true voice push notifications. For this reason last year I created another hacked solution for push notifications with Google Home. I believe that the user should decide if they want such notifications or not for each of their installed skills.

This model is already followed by the current notification model in the Amazon Echo. I can decide if I want notifications or not, and now all I need is another switch to decide if I want “you’ve got mail” style notification or plain ol’ “answering machine” style. Which do you prefer?

Checkout my Github repo for the code and start hacking away!

 Possibly Related Posts:

• Google Home Notifier (Google Home Push Notifications)
• Amazon Echo Official SDK
• Noel’s Amazon Echo Hack
• Amazon Echo, The Future or Fad?
• What Kids Tell Us about Touch and Voice

The post Alexa Push Notifications via Reminders first appeared on The AppsLab.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sLV2JGQpFgPossibly Related Posts:

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The post Jeremy on the Role of Emerging Technology first appeared on The AppsLab.

I guess to no one’s surprise, the actual booth with (free!) beer was a crowdpleaser;  we blew through the stock of 12 kegs with time to spare.

Lines for IoT Cloud Brewed Beer

That’s roughly 4000 pours (we only served small portions, between 2oz-8oz) in 3 days.

More importantly, and impressively, we recorded about 2700 ratings on the IoT Cloud Brewed Beer application I created for this project.  That’s a participation rate of almost 70%!  I.e., about 2/3 of the people that drank a beer, were compelled to rate the beer in our application.

That’s a participation rate of almost 70%!

When the dust settled, “Open World IPA” narrowly eked out a win over “Dark Side”, a stout brew, here’s the complete ranking:

1. Open World IPA – IPA (4.05 average out of 756 ratings)
2. Dark Side – Stout (3.94 average out of 683 ratings)
3. Hackers Den – Saison (3.72 average out of 632 ratings)
4. Belmonter – Kettle Sour (3.42 average out of 618 ratings)

100% Powered by Oracle Cloud

The IoT Cloud Brewed Beer application itself runs on the Oracle Application Container Cloud Service (ACCS).  The data (beers, ratings etc.) is stored in a MySQL Cloud Instance.  IoT Asset Monitoring Cloud provided the data that was gathered during the brewing process and while serving the beer.  The latter was actually used in the application to display the level of beer left in the kegs on tap.

Flow meter in kegorator, connected to IoT Asset Monitoring Cloud

Finally, I used the Oracle Developer Cloud Service to Continuously Deploy my code to the ACCS.  This is how it was all connected:

IoT Cloud Brewed Beer Application Topology

Editor’s note: We forgot to mention Relayr, a valued IoT Cloud Service  partner, who provided the device hardware, installed it at the brewery and provided the edge device management, connecting the devices collecting data to the IoT Cloud Service. Here is a more detailed version of the device architecture.

Sincerest apologies for the omission.

The application itself was designed so that it could easily be used on devices of various sizes.  That allowed me to create 1 application, yet use it in many different places.  For example, one manifestation of the application ran on giant (+18 inches) tablets placed on the kegorators themselves so that people could rate the beer as they were drinking it.

Tablets on kegorators

However, we also allowed people to rate the beers on their mobile devices so the same application could be accessed on any mobile phone.  The flow would adapt, based on how the application was accessed:

Finally, the same application was also accessible from the official Oracle Open World Application so 1 code base but 3 different use cases.

1 code base,  3 different use cases.

Going forward, the application can also be reused by Alpha Acid (@alphaacidbrewco) at the brewery itself.  It comes with a full Admin interface that will allow the brewery to add, remove or update beers as they brew and serve them at the brewery.  They can display the list of beers e.g. on a big screen in the tasting room, or on a tablet and let consumers rate the beers, or encourage users to open the application on their mobile devices and collect ratings that way.

The application was created as a Progressive Web App (PWA).  This provides some additional advantages over a regular Web App.  For example, the application will keep working even when their is no internet connection.  This can be crucial when using conference networks that predictably get overloaded and are notoriously unreliable.  Furthermore, they can be “installed” by the users, just like a regular, native application.  In fact, when they access to Web Application it will prompt the user if they want to install the application, no app store needed!  Finally, they look and behave the same way as a native application once installed on the Mobile device (see screenshots above; those are actual screenshots from a mobile phone using the Progressive Web Application).

Cheers.

Editor’s note: For more on this project, check out this writeup at Forbes and the two videos below, enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPtE4t9_itoPossibly Related Posts:

• IoT Workshop and Robots
• How to Fix Rating Systems
• Beer Geeks Win!
• IoT Cloud Brewed Beer @ OOW
• A Framework for Wearables, Glance

The post IoT Cloud Brewed Beer @ OOW: The Details first appeared on The AppsLab.

IoT device kit for workshop participants

Just come by Oracle Developer Community Lounge in Moscone West (no pre-registration is required), and we will walk you through the setup, wiring and testing IoT device to communicate with services in the Cloud. These workshops will run from Monday to Wednesday 10-4 at the developer lounge, do bring your laptop with you! Upon finishing, you can take the IoT device kit and continue to build remotely controlled automation projects. For some inspiration, head over for the IoT Cloud Brewed Beer, have a beer and dream about your project.

We have been busy on training – this time around, training our robots – Pepper and NAO. Both of them have learned a slew of skills and tricks, mostly well-behaved Anthony and I have  worked on extending all the intelligence of our CASS chatbot to both of them, in addition to their natively-born abilities and characters.

When real robots meet with chatbot

Come by the Oracle Developer Community Lounge to check them out, they will be there from Monday to Wednesday. Your interaction with Pepper and NAO is encouraged, please try to discover what tricks up their sleeves.  Oh, no sleeves?  probably we should have made long sleeve dresses for them Possibly Related Posts:

• Oracle Code – Recap
• For OpenWorld and JavaOne 2016, An Internet of Things Workshop
• OpenWorld Developer Challenges
• Oracle Social Network Technical Tour
• Where to Find Some Robot Action

The post IoT Workshop and Robots first appeared on The AppsLab.

To do this I will need to find boundaries within Alameda that I can associate with data of some kind. For this I turn to the ultimate source of geographical data within the United States: the U. S. Census Bureau. To do its work the Census Bureau divides the country into regions, states, counties, cities, tracts, and block groups and gathers data at each level. The main island of Alameda is divided into fourteen tracts which in turn are divided into fifty block groups.

All this data is free to the public and accessible via public APIs, but the government web sites are so sprawling and complex that most people access them through intermediary sites like Knight-Ridder’s Census Reporter. These sites do a great job at producing pre-made tables and choropleths, but I want to learn how to do it myself.

Knight-Ridder’s Census Reporter

After much hunting I find raw tract boundaries in a downloadable CSV file from the Alameda County Data Sharing Initiative. Using the Census Reporter site to identify tract numbers, I reduce the 372 tracts in Alameda County to the 14 on the main island of Alameda. Each tract boundary is defined by a long list of longitudes and latitudes.

I can now pull up my own Alameda map outline in NodeBox. When I convert each list to X,Y coordinates and overlay the paths, they don’t quite fit at first. I spend hours muttering and pulling my hair until I realize that the formula I’m using does not properly account for the curvature of the earth. There are different ways of projecting coordinates onto a flat surface and when you get down to the street level you need to get everything exactly right – especially when overlaying boundaries from different sources.

I got my original island boundary from Open Street Map. OSM stores its data using the same geographic coordinate system (EPSG 4326) used by GPS devices, but uses a different projected coordinate system (EPSG 3857) when creating its map tiles. To convert you need to use a spherical pseudo-Mercator projection (not the true oblate ellipsoid Mercator projection). Confused? I was – as were many others before me. Fortunately the correct formula (in many different programming languages) appears on the Open Street Map Wiki:

Formula for converting latitude and longitude

Note: the constant 6,378,137 in the formula is the idealized radius of the earth in meters. Formulas without this value did not work for me.

With the right formula in place, the tract boundaries snap perfectly into position. The boundaries extend beyond the shore, but for now are sufficient to verify proper alignment:

NodeBox display of tract boundary allignment

Choropleths convey more information (and look cooler) when you divide the map into smaller pieces. So having cracked the code for tracts, I now turn my attention to the smallest unit used for census data: block groups.

Finding block group boundaries expressed in pure latitudes and longitudes proves to be more difficult. I finally turn to the government’s TIGER site (Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing), but here I run into another problem. The boundary data is only available in shp files, which require a powerful application called arcGIS. This is what the big boys use, but I want to draw the boundaries myself.

My solution is to convert the shp file into GeoJSON format which I can then parse using NodeBox. I try a free online conversion service, but it doesn’t work. I locate an open source library that would do the job, but don’t feel like mucking about in javascript. I finally turn to a service called MyGeodata Cloud. The first five megs are free; my 11 meg file costs $3.55 – a fair price for the time saved.

Parsing the data was a multi-step process. The original file contained 31,647 boundaries, one for each block fragment in Alameda County. Using zip code data, I identify the 14 tracts on the island and use that list to filter the data down to a mere 1298 block fragments. I then group those block fragments into 282 blocks and those blocks into 50 block groups. Here is the NodeBox network I made to do the parsing:

NodeBox network which converts a GeoJSON file into a CSV

And here is what all those block fragments look like before I group them into block groups and trim them to fit the outline of the island:

NodeBox display of randomly colored block fragments

The final step, trimming the boundaries, takes some time and patience. The basic technique is to take the intersection of one shape, like a block group, with a second shape, like the island outline. But when you look closely you see that some of the defined boundaries only approximate the true shape of the island, leaving little slivers of leftover space here and there. To fix this I have to increase the area by doing a union with an arbitrary rectangle and then do an intersection to trim it back to the exact shoreline.

There are also some peculiarities. A tiny triangular corner of the island actually resides in San Francisco County. Since this is uninhabited marshland it cannot affect the data so I add it to the nearest block group. Another group has an absurdly narrow tongue which sticks up along the median of a street separating two other groups, creating a distracting mess. I quietly trim it away. This is the kind of thing you have to do when cleaning any dataset. The difference here is that instead of correcting numbers, you are correcting shapes. Here is the final result, slightly exploded to better show each block group boundary:

NodeBox display of exploded block group boundaries

Now that I finally have the boundaries of my choropleth it’s time to find data to color them with. The place to find that is a government site called the American Fact Finder. This site contains many different data sources or “programs”. In addition to the Decennial Census, there are housing surveys, commodity flow surveys, employer statistics, and much more.

The Census Bureau’s American Fact Finder website

I choose a source called the American Community Survey, the largest household survey the Census Bureau administers. Unlike the decennial census, it does not count everyone; it uses a statistical sample to estimate information based on surveys sent to 3.5 million households per year. So it’s not as accurate as the full census, but is more up to date. The estimates are quite reliable on a large scale, but can have a significant margin of error when applied at the block group level.

I select the 2015 5-year survey applied at the block group level in Alameda county. This reduces the available data to 342 separate tables including Median Age by Sex, Travel Time to Work, Household Size, School Enrollment, Median Income, Number of Bedrooms, Aggregate Rent, and on and on. You can only download forty tables at a time so I pick a few at random.

Using NodeBox I can easily read these tables, lookup individual values for each block group, and then color my block groups accordingly. Within minutes I am producing one choropleth after another:

A selection of Alameda choropleths generated in NodeBox

These maps may not seem all that interesting to you, but for someone like me who has lived on this island for twenty-five years they are fascinating. I can imagine hundreds of possible investigations. But for now I bask in the sheer power of effortlessly turning any random spreadsheet I come across into a gleaming, perfect choropleth.

As a final flourish I will take this idea to the next level. Instead of coloring each block group a solid color, I can fill it with randomly scattered colored dots, one dot for each person on the island. There are 63,043 people living on the main island and I can assign each one a color based on their self-identified race. Our racial diversity is one of the things I like about Alameda; it’s nice to finally see it in a single image:

NodeBox map of self-identified race in Alameda

I hope you have enjoyed this experiment. Open source mapping has become an energetic worldwide movement with a supportive community and many powerful tools. I have packed this post with links to help you get started on your own projects; here are some more.

For more tutorials see Mike Bostock’s Let’s Make a Map and Command-Line Cartography. D3 users should check out d3-geo, a library to convert GeoJSON to SVG paths. Leaflet is another javascript library which you can use to make mobile interactive “slippy maps“. Mapbox is a popular source of maps and tools for building mapping applications. Friend of the lab Ed Jones edits Open Street Map data using the JOSM plugin and uses the Street Map Plugin for UE4 to create 3D renderings.

Happy mapping!Possibly Related Posts:

• The Isle of Alameda
• Fun With Maps
• Fun With Facebook
• Who Likes Me?
• Our Real Time Ambient Display at OpenWorld

The post Choropleths first appeared on The AppsLab.

Hope to see you there!

Cheers,

Mark.

Update: Want to learn more? Check out this video Oracle Developers produced for the skinny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPtE4t9_itoPossibly Related Posts:

• IoT Cloud Brewed Beer @ OOW: The Details
• IoT Workshop and Robots
• Find Us at Oracle Code
• Welcome NAO
• Magical Links for a Tuesday in December

The post IoT Cloud Brewed Beer @ OOW first appeared on The AppsLab.

Oracle Code 2017

March 1, San Francisco, USA – August 30, Seoul, South Korea
183 days (exactly 6 months), 20 cities around the world
thousands of speakers, OTN staff and local consultants
hundreds of thousands of participants and coders

That’s the Oracle Code 2017 tour, presenting current and upcoming technologies in packed sessions, providing Oracle cloud services lab for hands-on experience, and a relaxing and fun Code Lounge to be inspired! It is a large scale event series by Oracle OTN and Marketing, to bring Oracle Cloud offerings directly to developers around the world.

As a member of AppsLab, I am blessed to have such an opportunity of joining the effort to push forward to Cloud Services. I would like to thank the following people: Stephen Chin for selecting IoT Workshop and Pacman-on-a-String for the tour and getting us involved from early on; Martha Hess for working with us on the component and equipment sourcing, delivery, training, hosting – basically covering from end to the end, to ensure the successful events in all the cities; Rob Clark/Jai Suri for providing multiple IoTCS instances as events went on. And of course, thank Jeremy/Jake for allowing us to allocate considerable effort and time on this major effort, and the full support from AppsLab team members.

The IoT Workshop was huge success across the board – participants were engaged, with one-on-one type of interaction with instructors, and we consistently heard very positive feedbacks from many participants in almost all cities.  The Pacman-on-a-String game is more relaxing fun area, where drew curious crowd and turned up some  gamer’s competitive nature – some people would keep playing to make to the top of leaderboard!

Here is a collage of snapshots of AppsLab team helping out at the events – San Francisco (March 1), Austin (March 8), Prague (April 28), Tokyo (May 18) and Seoul (August 30).

Code events that AppsLab members helped onsite

It is by far the largest scope of event that I have ever involved, with countless hours of time putting into the preparation, build, host and setup training for every city, and several onsite support. I hope it will have great outcome in accelerating adoption of Oracle Cloud Services, and building lasting relationship with all the coders!

In particular, I hope those about 1000 developers who participated the IoT Workshop, will continue their paths in learning IoT device programing, and this workshop served as their starting points. For all people stopped by the Pacman-on-a-String game station, I hope you had fun and maybe intrigued to learn some hardware device coding too. For those who were really into game and competed for ranking on leaderboard, we have 658 games recorded, out of thousands of games played (as many people did not put in their names). Here are the top 10 players!

Pacman-on-a-String game

I noticed an article on Oracle Developer Community official WeChat channel, reporting from Code Lounge area. It is such a great writing that I have to include it here. It uses a funny reference to famous interstellar, dimension-reduction attack detailed in The Three-Body Problem book, that I haven’t thought of. Also I want to mention that while in Tokyo the local culture is quite different and unique, where SEGA games still rule the street, and yes, they were naturally good at the Pacman-on-a-String game, and amused with the IoT twist.

In case you’ve missed the Oracle Code events in those 20 cities (how could you if coming to your city?:), here is a good news – an extra episode of Oracle Code will be held during Oracle OpenWorld. In addition, some non-portable large builds will be on display, as well as Pepper and NAO robots, being your Oracle Administrative Assistants at OTN Lounge.

Also stop by for the final IoT Workshop, if you have not tried it earlier. Better yet, have a beer served by IoT Beer station, which is built with the exact same thing you will learn at the IoT Workshop!Possibly Related Posts:

• IoT Workshop and Robots
• Oracle Code Behind the Scenes
• Kscope GO and IoT Workshop at Kscope17
• For OpenWorld and JavaOne 2016, An Internet of Things Workshop
• Find Us at Oracle Code

The post Oracle Code – Recap first appeared on The AppsLab.

So as part of my Fun With Maps project I set out to disentangle Alameda from the urban sprawl that surrounds it and, using open source data, make a cleaner map that captures the windblown isolation of a real island.

My starting point was Open Street Map (OSM), the wikipedia of the mapping world. Here is what Alameda looks like in OSM:

The Open Street Maps view of Alameda

Uck! What a mess. The orange outline shows the boundary of Alameda proper, but I am only interested in the main island. So to begin I select a tight rectangle around the island and export that as an SVG file:

Initial import of SVG vector paths

When I import this file into NodeBox and ungroup it I have nothing but 37,688 individual vector paths. There is no metadata; from here on out I have to reverse engineer everything myself.

My first step is to get rid of that corner of Oakland and all the gunk outside the main island. To do this I find the island’s outline path; feeding that into a Delete node removes everything outside it. I am now down to 24,024 paths.

Now the real sifting begins. I take a tour of my data by making a quick NodeBox movie: I slice 100 paths at a time and shift the starting point with each frame. When I hit play the result is moving spotlight which reveals how the paths are ordered.

Fortunately there is a discernible order. The land features (low tide boundaries, lagoons, airport runways, etc.) are in one section, building footprints in the next, streets after that, labels after that. I have only to pause the movie, note the index where one section ends and the next begins, and separate it all into distinct piles.

I now discover that there are 20,199 individual structures on the island: houses, detached garages, businesses, apartment buildings, etc. Even if you strip away all other paths, the building outlines alone nicely trace the overall shape of the island and even local features like lagoons and streets. The negative space around buildings is eloquent.

Building outlines reveal the shapes of streets and lagoons

Now that everything is organized into piles, I have only to toss what I don’t need (e.g. labels) and color the rest according to my own tastes. Here is the final result, a proper island:

My final version of The Isle of Alameda

If you don’t want to reverse engineer your own map using only SVG paths, there are alternatives. Mapzen is a commercial site which packages open source street map data and does much of the dirty work for you. They charge for polished products and high-volume data, but small amounts of data for personal projects are often free.

Like many recent open source mapping tools, Mapzen exports data in a format called GeoJSON. GeoJSON is just an ordinary JSON file with a standardized structure that associates metadata with boundary paths in a consistent way.

I created a Mapzen account and downloaded Alameda OSM data to check it out. Some features did come with metadata that allowed me to identify fire stations, hospitals, gas stations, schools, etc.) but the coverage was spotty. This is the problem with open source data: it’s free but often incomplete.

The abundance of open source mapping data, and tools like OSM and Mapzen, allow anyone to make their own maps. The possibilities, both for business and personal uses, are endless. In my next installment of Fun With Maps, I will learn how to tap into U.S. Census data and apply it to my own maps to reveal hidden patterns.Possibly Related Posts:

• Choropleths
• Fun With Maps
• Virtual Sleuthing with GeoGuessr
• Fun With Facebook
• Our Real Time Ambient Display at OpenWorld

The post The Isle of Alameda first appeared on The AppsLab.

NAO inside of egg-shell chair

Welcome NAO, our latest team member!

NAO is a little adorable humanoid robot created by SoftBank Robotics. It can talk, walk, and dance; it can read stories to babies; it can have a conversation with adult human……  Oh, and here is a clip of NAO practicing TaiChi – still a beginner but he managed to recover from mistakes

Its most prominent role is as a friendly companion, not a formidable machine taking over the world; and its most important trait is that it can learn new skills to help people and make you happy.

Many thanks to our friends at OTN (@OracleDevs) who have kindly to let us borrow this NAO semi-permanently. Hopefully we can train it to behave well, and be a helpful robot friend.

NAO doing salute gesture

For the next couple of weeks, I will be the pet-trainer, pet-sitter or whatever you call it, to teach NAO to perform some tricks. If you register for the OAUX Exchange during Oracle OpenWorld, you’ll be able to check out what tricks NAO has learned by then. We may also have it at the Oracle Developers Lounge at Moscone West during the week. Stay tuned for more.Possibly Related Posts:

• Find Us at Oracle Code
• On Hiring a Web Developer
• Do You Learn on Your Own?
• IoT Workshop and Robots
• Fun, Games and Work: Telepresence Robots

The post Welcome NAO first appeared on The AppsLab.