Grant: Strategic Projects Supplemental Competition

This project is designed to explore the domain of public interaction with large screens using personal devices such as cell phones or hand held devices. While there are an increasing number of public display systems in our environment, these typically are either interactive, but small and single user focused, e.g. information kiosks in airports, or passive, large broadcast displays such as the large advertising screens in Time Square, New York.Although both types are becoming more prevalent, it is the latter category, large, passive public displays that are becoming ubiquitous and can increasingly be found in public spaces. Although traditionally these displays are broadcast based, and thus non-interactive, there is a small but growing number of attempts to support personal interactivity with such public displays using hand held devices. This has ranged from the ability to send text messages via SMS to large public screens up to full interactive games which use cameras to track members of the public and incorporate them into the virtual game. In parallel with the developing ubiquity of large public displays, has been the saturation of personal devices, such as cell phones, PDAs and personal Audio/Video (AV) players. These devices offer a very personal experience for their users in terms of both control and media. However, regardless of their widespread use in public today, such personal devices are considered as non-traditional input devices in the domain of interactive large public display environments. This proliferation of public displays with minimal interaction and personal devices with small screens and limited AV offers a unique and growing environment for public-private dual screen interaction. This proposal is designed to address this space and to explore the design of interactive applications that use the combined strengths of the two to produce rich unified interactive experiences.