• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 28, 2015

In a historic move that will tie together billions of devices, Google announced Project Brillo, the underlying framework for the Internet of Things (IoT), at the company's I/O 2015 developers' conference Thursday. Working with the Nest team, Google engineers have developed an end-to-end communications layer built from the Android operating system to connect a variety of devices such as door locks and security cameras. 

Brillo becomes available for developers to preview in the third quarter this year. It will allow devices to connect with others, such as phones, as well as the cloud through WiFi, Bluetooth LE, and more through a communications layer called Weave. Google SVP of Products Sundar Pichai hopes this will become the first universal standard for IoT. The technology stack for Weave becomes available in the final quarter of 2015.

The model will work from standardized schemas, a semantic blueprint for the devices to have a common language. A door lock can define the two words "lock" and "unlock" as two phrases, so the connected devices can also understand, for example.

Voice APIs will also become part of the model for any connected device running Android. Any Android device will recognize others running on Brillo or Weave.

It's not clear whether the data from these actions will become available to target advertisements or content in search or elsewhere through deep linking, but some are considering these possibilities.