Show HN: SDK for using multiple iPhones as one big screen | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: SDK for using multiple iPhones as one big screen

mosaic.io

49 pointsniftylettuce31 comments

Reminds me of Junkyard Jumbotron, which came out of MIT a few years ago. The nice thing about that is that it runs on anything with a browser (I believe), and the devices don't have to be particularly close or well aligned. I haven't tried it -- I'm only going off of what's in their demo video.

http://civic.mit.edu/blog/csik/junkyard-jumbotron

That might be worth checking out because it uses a much different approach to achieve a similar effect.

Previous discussion, with comments of one of the developers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5480685 (100 points, 66 days ago, 52 coments)

Are you guys in anyway affiliated with swyp? http://fluid.media.mit.edu/projects/swÿp

Yes.

How do you get the screens to line up? Or is that done manually?

You can see them doing that in the video. The screens must be immediately adjacent and aligned orthogonally. It aligns on a finger drag from one device straight across to the other.

They've gotta have some smarts about the different bezel thicknesses for all iOS devices; I don't think finger velocity and displacement time would be accurate enough for determining the horizontal spacing.

That's it exactly! We've got some smarts about those bezels :)

When you say you can sync app data across devices, how do you know which sets of devices are trying to connect with each other? Because that's sort of the premise behind Bump... how does this beat that?

Similar premise, but the media applications are much more compelling. The SDK provides very precise locations of the devices relative to one another in addition to associating them to one another in a group.

Nice work guys! How well does it work for precise real-time applications like music/video?

This would be awesome for watching movies! Downloading right now.

You need a bigger screen. Let me think ... ummm ... like a Tablet, laptop or a desktop? How about TVs? :)

It works with iPads too!

Really? with the added bezels of the two devices in the middle?

This is cool. Is this coming to Android anytime?

I suspect this is extremely hard to do well on Android because you need to know a lot about the physical size and shape of the device. However if they limited it to say the 100 most popular devices it sould reasonable.

This is cool and all...but can you actually even use this for anything?

This is even less useful than The Playbook.

Playbook is pretty useful haha so that leaves a ton of room for usefullness.

Still curious how I could use Mosaic?

I don't get it. What's the point of this?

Does there need to be a point?

fun.

Please, please don't use the word "magically". Only Jobs could pull it off.

I still don't get what it is with the HN community battling as hard as it can to never have another Jobs, or any of the other greats. I consistently see comments that try to put people down so that they revert back to the mean.

And he sucked when he said that for every non magical thing they did.

I hate it when people who haven't built anything criticizes others for not being innovative enough anytime there is another photo-sharing app (or related vain product) here on HN. but seriously this is a really stupid idea and I wish you had directed your efforts into less silly effort. Did you really enjoy watching those images on several screens with those distorting breaks within devices?

Or maybe no?: http://instagram.com/p/UmEDP0j-Cg/ http://instagram.com/p/UaE7dQD-F_/

First world problems require first world solutions, but that doesn't make them any less valuable. Anyways...

Technical innovation, whether or not it seems immediately useful, can inspire others to be more creative and build better products.

I doubt even if this should pass as first-world problem. Do we have some people meeting and all of a sudden go like:

Gosh! I took a photo with Iphone #3 and now I want to view it across Ipad #1 and the two Galaxy s4s lying over there at thing same time. ?

Any use case you decide to put this to, won't fly in the face of good user experience.

I think you need to think one level ahead. The product is not photo sharing; it is the SDK. What they have shown is a simple application that shows what data the SDK could provide for your application. I can see this having some really cool applications in iOS/Android multi-player gaming, for example.

Also - and I know this is repeated often - this is a site for hackers, and this is a really cool hack. Maybe I'm not so smart, but it took me a while to figure out how it was being done, and I thought it was really clever.

this isn't a photosharing app...

(or related vain product)

I use photo-sharing app just as an example. But I'm referring to the larger context of people telling others to be more innovative and be involved in those world changing stuff instead of building such fleeting apps.

But yes, it does photo-sharing though not the main premise of the developer

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