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 marks a big step for the AddHawk team. PixelPusher has officially been presented for approval from the higher up management for a go/no-go status. All pre research for the project is completed and the team is ready and eager to begin full time development. The team also received useful feedback on the status of the project and is in an excellent state of crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s in preparation for the weeks to come.
Unlike many of the other updates from the group, this marks completion of the first monumental milestone for development of PixelPusher. Every week leading up to this one has been preparation for this presentation and approval. Front end developer Connor Hoene remarked on Wednesday that, “Even though it has only been a around 2 months of work so far, the amount of progress we have made forward is amazing. We couldn’t be happier about where we are right now.”
A Look Into the Future:
At this stage of development, the application, PixelPusher, is starting to become a reality. Every week for the next month and a half will be full of exciting and important news regarding the teams progress forward. Coming soon on the horizon is also the first live demo of the PixelPusher product to a small focus group. “While our first test will be fairly small and limited to only a handful of people, the implications are huge in finally getting a proof of concept up and working.” said backend developer Christopher Wood. The team is excited to be working on the project and looks forward to releasing more information as it happens in the near future. Stay tuned for more information coming soon!
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 crowd-sourced 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
