Publications

Table display surfaces, like Microsoft PixelSense, can display multimedia content to a group of users simultaneously, but it is expensive and lacks mobility. On the contrary, mobile devices are more easily available, but due to limited screen size and resolution, they are not suitable for sharing multimedia data interactively. In this paper we present a "Dynamic Tiling Display", an interactive display surface built from mobile devices. Our framework utilizes the integrated front facing camera of mobile devices to estimate the relative pose of multiple mobile screens arbitrarily placed on a table. Using this framework, users can create a large virtual display where multiple users can explore multimedia data interactively through separate windows (mobile screens). The major technical challenge is the calibration of individual displays, which is solved by visual object recognition using front facing camera inputs.

We present a framework which enables the combination of different mobile devices into one multi-display such that visual content can be shown on a larger area consisting, e.g., of several mobile phones placed arbitrarily on the table. Our system allows the user to perform multi-touch interaction metaphors, even across different devices, and it guarantees the proper synchronization of the individual displays with low latency. Hence from the user’s perspective the heterogeneous collection of mobile devices acts like one single display and input device. From the system perspective the major technical and algorithmic challenges lie in the co-calibration of the individual displays and in the low latency synchronization and communication of user events. For the calibration we estimate the relative positioning of the displays by visual object recognition and an optional manual calibration step.