BLACKSBURG, Va., April 17, 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.
Updates on PixelPusher:
This past week the AddHawk team completed a high fidelity prototype to use in the upcoming tests and evaluations. The team worked rigorously on both the back and frontends of the systems to finish the prototype available by Friday. The frontend team worked mainly on the aesthetics of the application and focused on making PixelPusher easy to grasp and understand for a first-time user. “We feel that the User Experience is vital to an application of this nature. We decided that spending a lot of time on making the application easy and satisfying to use was of the utmost importance.” explained frontend team member Dillon Gresham. One major feature that the team added was combobox functionality for when a user is selecting his or her seat. These comboboxes are paired with a grid highlighting the user’s specific location in the image.
The backend team also had an extremely busy week constantly tweaking and modifying the server while also setting up the PixelPusher API. The team was able to successfully set up the necessary server functionality and all members of the team could easily access the PixelPusher web page. Both teams worked together throughout the week to properly set up API requests so both the back and front end could communicate. AddHawk member Michael Peter said, “Getting the two ends to communicate was the biggest issue we faced. Once this problem was solved, the rest of the pieces fell into place.”
A Look Into the Future:
The upcoming week has a decent amount in store for the members of the AddHawk team. On Monday the team will complete its first evaluation with a group of users from the HCI Capstone class at Virginia Tech. The users will be given a list of tasks and shown what the application is capable of doing. After completing these tasks, the users will then be asked a series of questions and for any comments or suggestions they may have. While the team has completed the high fidelity prototype development on the application is far from over. The AddHawk members will continue to add features, functionality, and beautification to PixelPusher based on any suggestions received from the evaluations.
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
