Live2screen prototype
Event: Rapid Mobile Application Prototyping Workshop, by Jürgen Scheible Place: Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki Dates: 13-17 November 20061. Brief description
“live2screen” is a project resulting from the 2006 Autumn term Rapid Mobile Prototyping workshop at Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki. This application provides a means to interact between a mobile phone and a screen. It is a hybrid application with two sides: mobile side and display side. The live2Screen display side has 3 areas: “liveText”, “liveImages” and “liveIcons”. All areas have one thing in common: the user sends information through a mobile phone, which is then used to change animations shown on a large screen.
2. liveText
With liveText, the user writes and sends text messages, and that text information is sent to the server, which adds the message to a pool of past messages. Then Flash retrieves the information, picks a random message from the pool and animates it. When a animation ends, the process starts again. Pressing a key manually changes the message. Random fonts are used for each message, and by pressing a key the font is manually changed.
3. liveImages
liveImages works in a similar way to liveText: the user takes and sends photos, and those images are sent to the server, which adds the image to a pool of past photos. Then Flash retrieves the images, picks random photos from the poll and shows them. The images are shown 2 at a time in a horizontal split screen, and top and bottom halves are refreshed alternatively.
4. liveIcons
liveIcons allows the user to interact through a mobile phone with an animated icon on a screen. His mobile phone shows a representation of the icon on the screen. The user can change properties of the icon on his mobile phone, and the onscreen icon is changed in accordance to that. The properties are: icon shape; size; position on the screen.
5. Purposes and future developments
The application can be used for many purposes, for example: entertainment in public spaces; marketing; instalations; VJing; and performances. In the future, it will be also integrated with audio objects as part of Nuno Correia’s iAVo (interactive audio/visual objects) project.
6. Technical notes
The mobile phones run Python for Nokia S60. The information (text, images, data) is sent to a server, which runs PHP. The software used for the display side is Flash, which retrieves information from a server and creates animations based on that information.
7. Acknowledgements
Thank you to Kalle Mäntsälä for help on PHP programming. Thank you to André Carrilho for Flash visuals development. Thank you to Jurgen Scheible for the excelent workshop and Python code.
