JSFoo 2015

To show the possibilities of Javascript beyond web by sharing instances from past work at Kepler Lab (An Innovation Lab at Sapient).

Outline

From the beginning, computer applications have always been designed with a two way agreement between humanity & technology - We learn a bit of them & they learn us. For example, if you took the Microsoft Surface table to an old man in a village, would he be able to operate it? Probably not, and neither would we, had we not decided to accept the pseudo natural way of touching, scrolling, etc. It’s time that computers understand our world & we are free to do things more naturally. Picking a cup of tea in our world, should be enough of a cue for the system to be aware of our possible intentions. This is what we strive to achieve.

Natural experiences have been thought of to a great extent on the web. We simply need to answer questions in a new context. For instance:

• How could you go about rethinking the pre-loader in a screen-less world?
• When we say computers need to be aware, we mean connected entities. In essence, How can we design a truly modular system where individual elements know of each other’s existence?
• Sooner or later, all these experiences need to be mass produced. How can we scale, if needed?
• How can we measure the experience?

This is where we start to realize the merits of using web technologies over the traditional core ones. Especially, when web technologies are poised to be as powerful as the later.

Time & again we have heard of the term “Javascript Everywhere” & attributed it to javascript being used as a server side programming language or even databases. But the very fact that javascript could be run outside a browser, opens up possibilities, that were never thought before. So whether it’s a wrapper around openCV for object recognition or a raspberry pi bot, things are simply an npm-install away.

Speaker bio

“A hacker by heart, coder by profession who lives to die in a technology rich world”

Okay, now the robotic response - “Ajay works at the Innovation Lab at Sapient, as an Experience Technologist where he helps create natural experiences (Human Computer Interactions). He is an ardent fan of Javascript and prefers to use it as his first choice of language, wherever possible.”

And for those who like to dig in, I:
code @ http://github.com/loxxy
sleep @ http://www.stackoverflow.com/users/378806/loxxy
& enjoy making things @ http://sapientnitro.com - some of which are blogged @ http://experiencesutra.com