October 2018 Summaries

Building a successful product requires careful consideration of security, scalability, and reliability, as failing to address these aspects can lead to vulnerabilities and wasted resources. Traditional approaches that involve developing and managing all aspects of a product in-house can expose businesses to risks, especially as the product scales. A serverless approach, which leverages cloud providers for scaling and infrastructure management, offers advantages such as reduced costs, decreased time to market, and lower latency. PubNub provides a real-time messaging API that enhances product communication capabilities with quick message delivery and a global presence, supporting various applications from chat messaging to IoT device signaling. PubNub's Functions allow developers to execute custom code for message processing, offering features like translation, secure API calls, and data serving, with a wide variety of event handlers available in its Blocks Catalog.

Augmented reality (AR) offers innovative experiences for users and new revenue opportunities for game studios, but it also presents challenges in game design, particularly in multi-user settings where content synchronization is crucial. The integration of Magic Leap with PubNub technology addresses these challenges by enabling real-time interactions between AR headsets or physical objects across various locations. An example of this is the game "Cube Fight," where players use the Magic Leap Eye Gaze feature and a controller trigger to take cubes from other players, with PubNub managing the transmission of ownership state messages. This game illustrates how AR can incorporate social experiences even in single-player settings, enhancing user engagement. Developers interested in creating similar experiences can utilize Magic Leap's tools in conjunction with PubNub to build scalable, interactive AR applications that incorporate user interactions with both virtual and physical environments.

This tutorial delves into the integration of Magic Leap One with the PubNub Unity SDK to enable gesture-based control of internet-connected devices, particularly focusing on manipulating an RGB LED's state and color. Using Unity and Magic Leap's hand tracking API, users can send messages to a control channel on PubNub by performing specific hand gestures, such as thumbs, fists, or fingers, which are detected with high accuracy to trigger actions like turning the LED on or off and cycling through color modes. The tutorial details the setup and configuration of the development environment, including the necessary software and hardware components like the ESP8266 development board and NodeMcu. It guides users through creating a new Unity project, importing the Magic Leap Unity package, and integrating PubNub for real-time communication to control the LED, all while emphasizing the adaptability of the tutorial to future SDK updates. Additionally, it outlines testing and deployment procedures using the Magic Leap Remote, Play Mode, and actual device deployment, providing users with a foundation to further explore IoT applications with Magic Leap technology.

MIMIC MQTT Simulator is a versatile simulation platform that facilitates the development, testing, and demonstration of large-scale IoT applications by creating a real-world test environment with numerous IoT sensors, gateways, and devices. It allows PubNub users to establish a lab with MQTT sensors and devices to validate their IoT needs, aiming to reduce risks in deploying large IoT applications by enabling rapid prototyping, alternative testing, and scalability benchmarking in diverse scenarios. Users can assure their customers of handling large-scale connections, topics, and messages across different environments. An example use case involves simulating Bosch sensors to publish changing temperature data, demonstrating the simulator's capability to interactively or programmatically manage various sensor scenarios, as shown in a demo video where telemetry data is published every 10 seconds and real-time temperature changes are detected and displayed in the debug console.

API World 2018, held in San Jose, showcased the evolving landscape of API development, emphasizing niche market targeting and the increasing reliance on APIs for business integration and collaboration. The event highlighted the API community's shift towards solving specific business challenges, moving away from general applicability, and underscored the importance of customizable API platforms and event-driven integrations. With over 18,000 APIs available, the focus is on creating quality developer experiences that address business needs, as APIs play a crucial role in enabling digital experiences, driving marketing campaigns, and streamlining operations. The conference also stressed the critical need for enhanced security in API development, as APIs become a preferred attack vector, and encouraged compliance with standards like HIPAA and GDPR. Overall, the industry is fast-paced and dependent on technological advances, with a strong focus on improving connections in a highly connected world.

Magic Leap One is a cutting-edge augmented reality headset that integrates digital objects into the real world, offering transformative possibilities in computing. The article highlights the collaboration between Magic Leap and PubNub, a technology enabling real-time interactions in augmented reality (AR) environments, facilitating multi-user experiences by synchronizing actions across different users and devices. The tutorial provided guides users through setting up the Magic Leap development environment using Unity and PubNub, detailing steps to install necessary tools, integrate the PubNub Unity SDK, and execute a simple application that communicates a "Hello World" message. The tutorial emphasizes the importance of keeping software up-to-date due to the evolving nature of Magic Leap SDKs, and offers insights into deploying applications using the Magic Leap Remote and on actual devices. The guide is the first in a series intended to explore the potential of Magic Leap in AR, encouraging developers to engage with this burgeoning technology.