Section: New Software and Platforms

Smarties

Functional Description

The Smarties system provides an easy way to add mobile interactive support to collaborative applications for wall displays.

It consists of (i) a mobile interface that runs on mobile devices for input, (ii) a communication protocol between the mobiles and the wall application, and (iii) libraries that implement the protocol and handle synchronization, locking and input conflicts. The library presents the input as an event loop with callback functions and handles all communication between mobiles and wall application. Developers can customize the mobile interface from the wall application without modifying the mobile interface code.

On each mobile we find a set of cursor controllers associated with keyboards, widgets and clipboards. These controllers (pucks) can be shared by multiple collaborating users. They can control simple cursors on the wall application, or specific content (objects or groups of them). The developer can decide the types of widgets associated to pucks from the wall application side.

• Contact: Olivier Chapuis

• URL: http://smarties.lri.fr/

Smarties was used in the projects that led to the following publications this year:  [7], [8],  [22].