Collective Cool: Patchwork Display From a Bunch of Screens

What if you and your friends could put all of your web-enabled screens together – laptops, tablets, netbooks and smartphones – to create one large display? The team at MIT’s Civic Media lab have devised a way for you to do just that, and you don’t even have to do any of the hard programming work. It’s called the Junkyard Jumbotron, and it lets you display anything you want on a screen array just by taking a couple of pictures.

According to the video above, you put all of the screens together, point all of the gadgets’ browsers toward a unique URL (which you get at the Junkyard Jumbotron site) and then take a picture of the array. After emailing the picture to a special email address, the software figures out how to slice up the pic you want to display on the screens. Imagine being at a meeting or presentation, asking everyone to contribute a web-enabled device and using all of their gadgets to create a one-of-a-kind display. It’s a completely awesome way to bring together participants or just show off how tech-savvy you are.

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See more in Camera & Video or under Gadgets. March, 2011.