Always a focal point, the event’s standalone, geodesic domes and sleek air-clad structures — aka Sandboxes — are the perfect place for attendees to learn, explore, and directly interact with new Google products and technology via interactive demos, physical installations, and more.
Cloud
At the Cloud — CICD dome, a visual metaphor explores Google’s setup for CICD (Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery) during app deployment on the Android platform. A large monitor displays copy and graphics, while a scenic train display communicates the overarching narrative. The dome’s Lego train is designed to represent an update that needs to go through the Build, Test, and Deploy processes. Each fork in the track represents a different sub-process within the CICD sequence that needs to be completed. If a failure is triggered at any point, the track reroutes the train back to the beginning to start the process all over again. When there are no errors throughout the CICD process, the train completes its journey, symbolizing entry into the Google Play app store. Animations and graphics on Billboards (large Pixel XL phones) and large screens provide more details to help viewers understand the complete process.
Web - A beautiful feature housed within the Web Sandbox? A living wall. The collaborative, user-generated art mural showcases the ability to run Linux apps on Chrome OS — a dream interactive for developers. Attendees can modify parts of the mural’s elements — trees, flowers, plants, butterflies, fireflies, and even Tux, the penguin — by changing their respective JSON files. Each change pushes a new vignette into the digital mural. Attendees perform modifications through a custom command-line tool, via terminal (vim), or VS code.
Lighthouse - Also within the Sandboxes, attendees can explore Lighthouse, a Chrome extension that audits a website and gives insights on how to improve key functions including SEO, best practices, performance, and accessibility.
Users can input a URL via a touchscreen to trigger a lighthouse audit of the aforementioned functions and a report on its build quality. The best part? Five scenic lighthouses flank the central touchscreen, communicating the quality score through their lights with green indicating a high performance and red signaling a weaker performance.
Google Maps - An app built using Google Maps and Google Cloud Functions allows users to pick the right route to Shoreline Amphitheatre. Users get to learn all about the benefits of building products with Google Cloud Functions in a way that is completely interactive and most of all… FUN! To note, Cloud Functions use serverless cloud infrastructure that scales up and down based on user demand and they are charged based on that usage only. This, in turn, leads to more efficiency and savings over traditional server-based cloud products.
Users pick an origin point on a touchscreen, then to choose a mode of transportation, they pick up a model of a car, bike, pedestrian or bus and place it on an RFID scanner. Users can then use the slider to increase or decrease the RPS (Requests per Second). A cost counter shows the cost incurred by the user by running this app built on serverless Cloud Functions. By tapping on the touch screen users can see a breakdown of costs as well.
Office Hours and Codelabs - Office Hours gives attendees the opportunity to meet one-on-one with Google experts and get answers to all their technical questions. And over at Codelabs, developers get hands-on experience at Google’s ready-to-code kiosks as they learn about the latest and greatest Google technologies.