Smarties: An Input System for Wall Display Development

International audienceWall-sized displays can support data visualization and collaboration, but making them interactive is challenging. Smarties allows wall application developers to easily add interactive support to their collaborative applications. It consists of an interface running on touch mobile devices for input, a communication protocol between devices and the wall, and a library that implements the protocol and handles synchronization, locking and input conflicts. The library presents the input as an event loop with callback functions. Each touch mobile has multiple cursor controllers, each associated with keyboards, widgets and clipboards. These controllers can be assigned to specific tasks, are persistent in nature, and can be shared by multiple collaborating users for sharing work. They can control simple cursors on the wall application, or specific content (objects or groups of them). The types of associated widgets are decided by the wall application, making the mobile interface customizable by the wall application it connects to