The Smarties System

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 (in C++, java, C# for Unity 3D) 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. Developpers 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 developper can decide the types of widgets associated to pucks from the wall application side.

You can download a high res version of the video here. You can also read this paper for more details.

News / history

Authors & Contact

Smarties was created by Olivier Chapuis, Anastasia Bezerianos and Stelios Frantzeskakis. Bruno Fruchard worked with the V2 Smarties client.
Olivier Chapuis and Anastasia Bezerianos are members of the HCC/ILDA research team (LRI - Univ. Paris-Sud & CNRS, Inria).
Stelios Frantzeskakis contributed to the birth of the system during his 6 months Inria internship in 2012.

Contact us directly for research related questions or via the forums for questions on the sofware (use, developpement, bugs, etc.).

Reference

If you use Smarties for your research please cite the following paper.

Olivier Chapuis, Anastasia Bezerianos & Stelios Frantzeskakis. Smarties: An Input System for Wall Display Development. In CHI '14: Proceedings of the 32nd international conference on Human factors in computing systems, 2763-2772, ACM, April 2014.
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