BLACKSBURG, Va., Feb. 20, 2015 – PixelPusher is a group of Computer Science students taking their HumanComputer Interaction capstone project to a massive scale. They begun working on 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 from PixelPusher: This week we thoroughly researched our current competitors and contemporaries by conducting a competitive analysis, a literary review, and created an annotated bibliography. We discovered a variety of applications that enable multiple devices to display shared image, video, and audio streams in real time through crowdsourcing the connected users. Some of the notable applications discovered through research include Mosaic, Junkyard Jumbotron, and PixelPhones, which are all opensource and currently in development. We have also looked into the important issue of how the network of connected devices contained within our application should be constructed. We have found various implementations of network architectures through our competitive analysis and research that we are looking into currently in order to determine which strategy fits our needs best. In addition to research, we had the opportunity to meet with our project sponsor, Benjamin Knapp. We also met with Matthew Favaro, who developed a prototype of our application and conducted preliminary research and of the PixelPusher idea. During our meeting, Benjamin mentioned the possibility of including audio streams in addition to images and video. We also discussed the current state of Lane Stadium’s lack of WiFi or 4G signal, among other things.
A Look Into the Future: We plan on continuing to look into possible solutions to the connectivity problems at Lane Stadium. After analyzing a number of scholarly articles we feel that we are close to determining the best fix for this issue. We aim to meet again with our sponsor and possibly the Athletic Director to discuss which solution they feel will work best for the stadium. PixelPusher is also looking into the various available solutions to the problem of networking connected devices in our system. Looking to our competitors as well as our research will guide us in determining the best architecture to use for this.
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. “PixelPusher Studios 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. ”
Contact Person: Christopher Wood cmw2379@vt.edu
