FOSDEM was great fun! Two days full of conferences and demos; lots of interesting technologies and interested people - and most of all: talking to so many new faces about Matrix and potential uses and integration ideas.
Both our lightning talk and IoT-devroom talk were completely filled up with huge queues outside (sorry folks), and our demos seemed to go down fairly well. In fact several people set up their own homeserver and joined the federated network of Matrix servers during FOSDEM itself!
Here's a view from our stand, from our lightning talk and from our IoT-devroom talk.
If you missed the talks, recordings will (soon) be available from the FOSDEM site (links will be added here once available) - in the meantime you can check out the slides here: lightning talk and IoT-devroom talk.
Thanks to everyone who came to have a chat about Matrix and/or help with setting up their own homeserver (or to play with Sentinel, our mascot) - please do reach out to us via our Matrix HQ room or IRC (#matrix on freenode) if you have any problems - or want to help us fix our python packaging ;) Now is a great time to get involved as we are currently landing new APIs and soon will be offering an Application Server API to ease bridging to other services.
This weekend, Matrix is heading to FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting) in Brussels, Belgium. We will be hosting two events: a lightning talk on Saturday at 16:30 in room H.2215 (Ferrer), and an IoT devroom talk on Sunday morning at 11:00 in room H.2213.
FOSDEM's schedule is looking very interesting and varied, and we hope we can learn about interesting projects - and of course show how and where Matrix can be used to lots of FOSDEM-attendees. Please come over and have a chat if you are interested; we have a stand on the second floor in the K building - just take a right after coming up the stairs and say hi!
We have also set up a Matrix <-> IRC bridge on the #fosdem channel on freenode, which means that any conversation happening there will be copied over to #fosdem:matrix.org - and vice versa. Making bridges to other services is currently being worked on as part of the Application Services API - we want to be able to connect different services together via Matrix.
Finally, we are always available in the official Matrix HQ room - please join and say hi!
Last week we had a great time attending WebRTC Conference Expo Paris 2014 - chatting to lots of new folks about Matrix; speaking in the "To Build or Not To Build" panel discussion; giving a general presentation on Matrix, and participating in the Demo shoot-out.
And we're very proud to say that we won the Best Innovation Award for a slightly frantic demo, showing an iPad mounted on our pet Trossen Robotics PhantomX Hexapod being used for robot telepresence by streaming video and audio to an Oculus Rift VR headset. This was using our proprietary in-house WebRTC stack, but once Matrix has fully taken off we hope to share our WebRTC stack with the world too :) This was a very last minute demo - we wanted to show something different to normal browser-to-browser IM/Video calling via Matrix and had the idea to use the Rift at the last minute - and in fact it still wasn't working when we went on stage (turns out that iOS 8.1 introduces some quirks in the video capture API which were producing corrupt video). By switching from an iPhone 5S running iOS 8.1 to an iPad running iOS 6 we were able to turn the demo around in the nick of time and get it working live on stage (modulo a RGB<->BGR colourspace bug) just in time to win the award. Huge thanks to the jury for voting for us against the odds :D For those interested in displaying raw video straight onto the Oculus Rift (without using any head-mounted tracking), there's an OpenGL code snippet up at https://gist.github.com/ara4n/875b5e8b66be3617efb7.
(Image credit to Victor Pascual Avila at Quobis)
Also, huge congratulations to Vladimir Beloborodov who won the Best Data Channel Award for hacking his Romotive telepresence robot to rendezvous via Matrix with his iPad, stream video via Google's WebRTC stack and control the robot's motion via the WebRTC Data Channel:
We're really excited to see other folks' Matrix projects out there winning prizes!
The Matrix team is at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2014 this week - we had a great time at the hackathon on Saturday/Sunday where we were really excited to see several teams building their hacks on Matrix APIs - we stayed the night to support whilst building out our own hack (experimenting with sending collaborative 3D animations over Matrix as JSON)! Huge thanks to everyone who built on top of Matrix - hope you had as much fun as we did :)
Please come talk to us in person in Startup Alley (next to the Brazilian Pavilion) if you're attending Disrupt and find out all about Matrix first hand!
(Photo shows us somehow surviving in the 6am slot. Mental note to never try to do raycasting vector maths after being up for 24 hours again...)
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