BLACKSBURG, Va., March 20, 2015 – AddHawk is a group of Computer Science students taking their Human Computer Interaction capstone project to a massive scale. They begun working on an application called PixelPusher, a massive crowdsourced display in Lane Stadium, using all the attendees mobile device screens as pixels. This type of project, mobile phone mosaics, has been attempted by several companies before, including Sony, HTC, and Blinkendroid. “The current guinness world record is 400 devices, we’re optimistically looking at 50,000.” said PixelPusher developer Michael Peter. The current record belongs to China Unicom, Sohu IT and HTC which used 400 HTC One devices in July of 2013, playing a one minute advertisement. This project could beat that record by over a hundred times the amount of screens.
Updates on PixelPusher:
This week the AddHawk team flew through the Prototyping stage and finally settled on a design to push forward with. The team considered many different possible paths for PixelPusher but struggled the most with choosing the most efficient way to pinpoint a User’s location. Some of the solutions considered were a ticket barcode scanner, using location services, having the User manually enter his or her seat information, among others. After informally testing the prototype with potential users, the AddHawk team decided the best route to take would be to implement an interactive map that allows a User to select his or her current seat location.
“We feel that the amount of students at VT football games who do not sit in their assigned seats is high. With this in mind, we wanted PixelPusher to allow users to be able to accurately and easily select their current seat number. We felt that the interactive seating chart was the best way to achieve this goal. ” commented AddHawk Frontend Developer Connor Hoene.
The team also put extensive work into possible backend prototypes, further advancing into the prototyping process at a level deeper than originally planned. According to backend developer Michael Peter, “While the frontend is important, due to the size of this project, the backend was just as important for us to focus on during this stage.”
A Look Into the Future:
In the upcoming weeks the two parts of the AddHawk team will start to split the work and tackle the majority of it separately. The backend team composed of Christopher Wood and Michael Peter will begin extensive venue scouting to determine how each setting will handle a large stress load on its network connection. “After doing more research into potential venues, Michael and I feel we will have enough information to determine which backend prototype we should continue forward with. ” said AddHawk Frontend Developer Christopher Wood.
The frontend team, Dillon Gresham and Connor Hoene, is diving into developing and designing PixelPusher and hopes to have a working shell of an application within a week or two. The entire AddHawk team will combine the code and information generated and prepare for a meeting with the team sponsor, Ben Knapp, in a couple of weeks.
Mission Statement:
PixelPusher will allow football fans in Lane Stadium at Virginia Tech to display individual pixels on their phones which are part of a larger image. In this way PixelPusher acts as a crowdsourced collaboration application that will bring together football fans everywhere. PixelPusher also aims to break the current world record of 400 connected devices. The application will be developed with the idea of simplicity and efficiency at heart, providing a lightweight, seamless user interface to football fans at Virginia Tech.
“AddHawk is an up and coming software development initiative aimed at revolutionizing how a single member of a crowd can have a huge impact on an event. ”
For more information or questions please contact: cmw2379@vt.edu
