HuddleLamp Can Combine Multiple Mobile Displays on the Fly

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

Opens up exciting possibilities for cross-device interplay

The population of mobile devices that are almost all screen has exploded in recent years to a point that it is now common for a single person to have many such all-screen smart devices. This brings us to the question: Why is there no app and/or hardware solution for seamlessly combining multiple smartphones and tablets — even if those belonging to the same platform — into one giant display on the fly?. While a mainstream solution has yet to show up, a partnership between the Human-Computer Interaction Group of the University of Konstanz, the Intel ICRI Cities at University College London (UCL), and the UCL Interaction Centre (UCLIC) has yielded something that ought to please some passionate and adventurous developers.
The HuddleLamp is essentially a desk lamp that has a motion-tracking RGB-D camera built in to track the movements and positions of both hands and mobile devices on a flat surface, allowing for some pretty exciting interplay between devices and users.
“This enables a new breed of spatially-aware multi-user and multi-device applications for around-the-table collaboration without an interactive tabletop. At any time users can add or remove displays and reconfigure them in space in an ad-hoc manner without the need of installing any software or attaching markers,” reads the official HubbleLamp page. “Additionally, hands are tracked to detect interactions above and between displays, enabling fluent cross-device interactions. We contribute a novel hybrid sensing approach that uses RGB and depth data to increase tracking quality and a technical evaluation of its capabilities and limitations. For enabling installation-free ad-hoc collaboration, we also introduce a web-based architecture and JavaScript API for future HuddleLamp applications. Finally, we demonstrate the resulting design space using five examples of cross-device interaction techniques."

Image Credit: HuddleLamp
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