One of the most exciting announcements that Google made this week during its annual Google I/O conference was the launch of the new Android Open Accessory initiative. The company is creating a standard mechanism for interfacing Android devices with external hardware. This will open the door for Android interoperability with a lot of other gadgets.

Google is also working to make the open accessory ecosystem open to hobbyists and independent developers. The Open Accessory kit is a low-cost Arduino-based board for prototyping Android hardware integration. The search giant gave out some boards to developers at the conference, which means we will probably start seeing some cool hacks from the Android community in the near future.

Google unveiled several impressive demos of the Open Accessory technology during the event. The best was a large-scale reproduction of Labyrinth, the classic ball-and-maze game. They had a giant-sized Labyrinth board on display during both days of the event and rigged it so that it could be controlled externally by the gyroscope in an Android tablet. Conference attendees took turns tilting the tablet to control the maze game and competed to try to get the large ball all the way through without dropping it in a hole.