Developers for wearables be on the lookout for an SDK for wearable technology to launch from Google within two weeks. That’s according to Sundar Pichai, who spoke at the South by Southwest(SXSW) conference in Austin Texas in the US overnight.
As head of the Android and Chrome team, Sundar Pichai would certainly know about this. Pichai advised that with wearables, Google is looking at the new hardware category ‘at a platform level’. He added that ‘We’ll lay out a vision for developers as to how we’ll see this market working’ and this is where a wearables SDK will come into play. Google wants to ‘develop a set of common protocols by which they can work together. They need a mesh layer and they need a data layer by which they can all come together’.
When thinking of wearables, most people automatically think of the smartwatch category that is hot right now, with most companies confirmed or rumoured to be working on their own smartwatch. But, Google wants to look further afield, with Pichai saying ‘when we say wearables, we are thinking much more broadly’ which makes sense with Google’s own hero product – Glass – currently the hot tech product in wearables.
Google has obviously been looking at the wearable space for a while now. Most likely even further back than the Q3 2013 earnings call, where Larry Page first noted their interest in the space, publicly saying :
‘For years everyone talked about the multi screen world. Now it’s arrived … BUT at a scale few imagined. People increasingly have more than one device. And screens are proliferating — in the home as well as wearable screens like watches and Google Glass.
While Glass and Smartwatches are the obvious choice, there’s more to come and it seems that Google is positioning themselves for the battle for the wearable space early.
What other wearable type devices could be possible?
