Ever dreamed of turning lights on and off with your Android smartphone? Want to push music around the house like iPhone fanboys can with AirPlay. Google is bringing that to you with Android @ Home and Google Tungsten, their latest creations.
Android @ Home will consist of a series of open source libraries which developers will be able to use to create home automation apps on the Android platform. Any device plugged into an Android @ Home receiver will work with Android’s automation API’s. Imagine carrying your tablet or phone around the house, and if you forgot to shut off a light or appliance, you can do it remotely by tapping a button on your screen. Or, imagine your house turning into a giant, Android-powered media streamer.
Google Tungsten combines the Android @ Home framework with the Google Music cloud, resulting in system of audio streamers in the hope that function much like Sonos or Airplay-enabled devices. In the demo at Google IO, they showed off a little glowing box connected to speakers. Using your Android device, they pushed music to the device from Google Music, and theoretically could do the same for as many connected audio zones as you need.
Standalone devices that used to do this in the past seemed too gimmicky and pieced together to have a place in our daily lives. But because Android @ Home works these ideas into a device that we use all the time, it makes the idea of a smarthome alluring. [Google IO]