Rick Borovoy and Brian Knep at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media have put together a public project – Junkyard Jumbotron – enabling users to combine multiple devices into a single screen.

The experimental platform allows users to spread single images across the displays of all the devices, creating the effect of one large overall display.

Users load a URL in the web browser on each device, which displays a unique calibration image on each of the separate displays. A photograph of the displays is then sent to the MIT server, which is then able to determine the relative position of each display and thus which parts of the image to show on which screen.

Try it for yourself at jumbotron.media.mit.edu.

Via Core77, thanks to Andrew Muir Wood for the link.

Marek Pawlowski

Marek Pawlowski is the founder of MEX. Since 1995, he has focused the MEX business on helping digital industries to develop better, more profitable products through improved understanding of user behaviour with mobile devices and wireless networks. MEX is best known for its events, research and consulting, which balance commercial, technical and user insights to define the future of mobile user experience.

View Comments

  • I'd love to see a photo of the results if anyone comes up with an interesting combined display - email me at mp at pmn dot co dot uk.

Recent Posts

Design Talk 80. Digitally sustainable; Mirren Fischer, Founder, Brilliant Product Design

Mirren Fischer is someone who finds herself at the confluence of some really big challenges:…

5 years ago

Design Talk 79. Our future towns; Dan Phillips, Royal College of Art

Poetry and place...listening and lockdowns... Dan Phillips, who led the Royal College of Art's (RCA)…

5 years ago

Design Talk 78. Mark Baldino, co-founder, Fuzzy Math

Mark Baldino's path to co-founding a Chicago-based design agency wends its way from a degree…

5 years ago

Design Talk 77. Paul Campbell, Chief Product Officer, Centaur Robotics

Paul Campbell, a former chief designer at Ford, is now re-imagining the wheelchair at Centaur…

6 years ago

Interaction unintended

Opening the oven released a cloud of steam. I should have been expecting it. It's…

6 years ago

Design Talk 76. Placeful computing; Jared Ficklin, Chief Creative Technologist & founding partner, argodesign

Jared Ficklin's approach of 'think by making' has led him to produce remarkable digital design…

6 years ago