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:
These past two weeks the AddHawk team finalized development of the PixelPusher application, fixing any flaws and imperfections that were encountered. With PixelPusher fully operational, the team was able to conduct a user evaluation to test various aspects of the system, such as general usability, synchronization between connected devices, efficiency of communication between the server and client-side devices, and so on. The team will use the data and metrics gathered from the evaluation to further improve upon the current application.
“Evaluations are very helpful since they point out aspects of your technology that you would otherwise be completely blind to. When you’re developing something, it’s easy to become unaware of the things that may not be intuitive for other people since only a select few people have seen the application up until the evaluation,” explained PixelPusher developer Connor Hoene.
The AddHawk team also practiced their rhetorical skills by giving a couple of mock presentations in order to prepare for Institute for Creative Arts and Technology (ICAT) Day, which is coming up next week on Monday, May 5th. The developers are scheduled to showcase their final design in the “Social Computing Meets Creative Computing” time slot at the event.
A Look Into the Future:
The future is looking quite bright for the AddHawk team. Even though PixelPusher is a finalized, fully-functional system at this time, there is still much more to be done in terms of development and implementation of the product. After presenting PixelPusher at ICAT Day this upcoming Monday, the developers will continue to improve upon features of the application over this summer and into the next semester. One of the most important aspects of this improvement is scaling up testing to include more users in various locations, since PixelPusher is aimed to eventually be used in Lane Stadium. The team has also been in contact with their sponsor, Dr. Ben Knapp, who is greatly facilitating the growth of PixelPusher. Dr. Knapp, like the AddHawk development team, has a great vision for PixelPusher and has been a valuable asset throughout the entire process.
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
