"Leaping" Edge Home Automation at JavaOne

Posted by Kai Kreuzer on September 29, 2013
The JavaOne conference in San Francisco is over - it was my first JavaOne and I enjoyed it a lot. Not necessarily because of the sessions, but because of the venue and all the gifted people that I had the chance and pleasure to meet.

Our week started with being announced as a winner of the Duke's Choice Award which is given by Oracle and the Java community to innovative organizations and developers. It was a great honor receiving this award!

In order to prove that we have deserved it, we prepared a live demo of openHAB for our talk at JavaOne that showed absolutely leading edge home automation using a Leap Motion sensor. If you do not know about this yet, check out our video of what it allows you to do (when being integrated with openHAB):


That's cool, isn't it? And this is just the tip of the iceberg; hacked together by Thomas in the kitchen of an A380 (yeah, the kitchen was the only place with a socket...) on the flight to San Francisco. The Leap Motion sensor can recognize many more gestures and its API is continuously improved. At first I thought that this is only a neat toy for live demos. But having used it a few times now, I am convinced that this technology is capable of completely changing the way we think about switches and controls in our home - exciting times are ahead of us!

As Duke's Choice Award winners we were also invited to Oracle's TV show, the Oracle OpenWorld 2013 Live. It was thrilling to be on this show talking about openHAB and smart homes to the Editor in Chief of the Java Magazine, Caroline Kvitka. The recording of this live interview is available now:


As you might already know, we have proposed the Eclipse SmartHome project to further drive innovation for smart homes. JavaOne was the first conference to mention this and we even had our brand new logo just in time:


We really hope that we can get many players from the industry and from the academics behind this project to make sure that the Intranet of Things does not become a bulk of silos, but that the smart home future is truly connected.