MERA participated as a speaker and Gold Partner in a major IT event of Nizhny Novgorod — the fourth international Google-related conference organized by the local Google Developers Group (GDG NN).
October 27, Nizhny Novgorod — GDG DevFest Gorky 2018 took place at a modern Technology Park Ankudinovka and brought together over 500 participants and speakers from Europe and the US. The conference headlines included 16 presentations with the subject matter ranging from web and mobile development to such hottest topics as Cloud technologies, Machine Learning, and the Internet of Things. An engineer from a MERA office in Nizhny Novgorod was among the few Russian IT specialists invited to deliver at GDG DevFest. You can learn the details of his presentation here. Besides, the company became a sponsor of the event and set up a booth where demonstrated various Google technologies put into practice.
Anyone could try out a connected photo booth, developed by MERA engineers with the use of Android Things Starter Kit and a Google Home smart speaker. It operates in the following manner: guests speak voice commands to interact with the system through an intelligent Google Assistant. The device asks further questions and, based on the answers, would take or retake a picture. Then, the neural network built with TensorFlow adds one of the pre-arranged filters to the image. In case the user likes what they see, the picture is uploaded to the Firebase Cloud Storage. From there a short link to the photo is sent to the printer in the form of a QR code.
A team of MERA engineers also prepared a VR quest for the guests of the conference. Using a combination of Google Cardboard with a mobile device running Android, a user can experience the world of Virtual Reality created with a 360° camera. The quest participant ‘travels’ across five offices of a MERA Russian-based R&D center collecting clues that indicate the word they need to guess in order to win. The quest was designed with the help of WebVR – an experimental web framework that allows experiencing VR in a browser. To store the participants score easily and free of charge, Google Firebase was used.
For reference
MERA is a software services provider for a number of industry verticals, including Information & Communication Technologies, Automotive and Transportation, Industrial Automation and IoT, FinTech, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. The company was founded in 1989 and is headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland with offices in the USA, Russia, Serbia, and Lithuania and delivery capabilities all around the world. For more information, please visit www.mera.com.
Google Developer Group DevFests are the largest Google related events. Each DevFest is organized by local GDG community to bring in the best speakers from all over the world.
