I went to the Android Campfire gathering last night at Google. I’m not sure I walked away with many answers, but I got a cool T-shirt, and, more importantly, I’m more motivated to work on Android stuff again.

The good news is that another Android event coming up on February 6.

Here’s what I took from the campfire last night:

Q. When is the next release of the SDK expected?

On the order of weeks, not months. I don’t blame them for waiting to release until it’s ready, but not knowing if there will be a new release before the contest deadline is a pain.

For example, the camera isn’t very useful in the current version, and there are a lot of cool features that could be written to use it. I’ve been holding off on anything involving the camera just in case a new release came out, but I bet I’m going to end up just simulating the picture-taking.

Q. How many people at Google are working on Android?
I’m glad that someone asked this question. A few weeks ago when things got really quiet on the Android front, I started to suspect that Android might be a side project between a couple of engineers.

I’m not sure there was a clear answer, though. I think someone mentioned on the order of magnitude of 100, but it wasn’t definite. I counted at least 8 Google people in the room working on Android, so that’s better than I suspected a few weeks ago.

Q. How will users be able to install an app that I write onto their phone?

Once again, no clear answer. I believe their goal is to make it simple and as easy as it is to downloan an app and install it onto a computer, but we’ll see things turns out.

This ties into what is ultimately the only question worth asking, “How is Android going to be any different from other mobile platforms currently out there that are locked down by the carriers?”

This was a common theme in many of the questions asked last night by people evaluating Android as a platform. There was a lot of skepticism as to how “open” things would actually be when it comes down to an actual device on an actual carrier’s network. It’s understandable, I’ve been down that road with writing J2ME apps, and I’m not keen on running into the same obstacles.

The vibe I got is that an open platform is the goal of the Google folks last night, but unfortunately I suspect the battle for the success of Android is going to be determined by lawyers, not engineers.

Intel predicts the personal net

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7176177.stm

Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show, Paul Otellini predicted mobile devices could soon “augment reality” by pulling data from the net in real time.

He said the industry was on the verge of creating a “new level of capability and usefulness to the internet”.

“It’s an internet that is proactive, predictive and context-aware.”

Explaining that devices would be location-aware, and would access the internet over Wimax wireless connections, he said: “Instead of going to the internet, the internet comes to us.

“We need a ubiquitous, wireless broadband infrastructure. Eventually we will blanket the globe in wireless broadband connectivity.”

The December issue of The Economist had some great articles on Augmented Space.  That’s really the ultimate goal for the Metosphere.

Real and virtual worlds – Better together
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10251972

The next step is to call up information about your surroundings using mobile devices—something that is starting to become possible. Beyond that, “augmented reality” technology blends virtual objects seamlessly into views of the real world, making it possible to compare real buildings with their virtual blueprints, or tag real-world locations with virtual messages.

All these approaches treat the internet as an overlay or an adjunct to the physical world, not a separate space. Rather than seeing the real and virtual realms as distinct and conflicting, in short, it makes sense to see them as complementary and connected. The resulting fusion is not what the Utopians or the critics foresaw, but it suits the rest of us just fine.

Reality, only better
http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10202623

Mark Livingston, head AR researcher at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, says his team is developing “3-D ink” writing methods that will allow soldiers to paint virtual symbols or text onto the real world, so that other soldiers who arrive at the same spot later can see them.

Our Metosphere blog is up.  I’m not sure where we’ll take this, but I expect we’ll be writing about the Metosphere, Android, and mobile stuff in general.