Junkyard Jumbotron: join all your screens into one big one, no software install needed

Here's a demo of the Junkyard Jumbotron, created by Rick Borovoy at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media. It's a cool app to allow you to gang up multiple screens (phones, tablets, flat panels), running any OS, and turn them into a single, joined display. It's very clever: you arrange the screens as desired and then display a web-page with a QR code on each of them; snap a picture and send it back to the server and the server takes any image you feed it and splits it across the screens. No client-side software needed, apart from a browser.

Junkyard Jumbotron (Thanks, Akwhitacre, via Submitterator!)

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To make your own Junkyard Jumbotron, please use http://jumbotron.media.mit.edu. The jj.brownbag link above is an earlier version of the software. And please post your feedback / results on the Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Junkyard-Jumbotron/207846822564634
-l-l-l-

junkyard jumbotrons made in real time are better ^^
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stiveune/4523860016/in/set-72157622736557241/

but i must admit this app rocks
djn

Ok, that QR / photo idea is downright neat. I wonder if that could be adapted for multimonitor desktops somehow?
- Anonymous
  
  I’m pretty sure it’d work on any screen that can navigate to a website (watch the vid).
  
  However I doubt it’d be better than the technology we already have for said activity.
Anonymous

Should I take it the iphone has worse color than those Samsungs?
coaxial

i saw a similar technology at Microsoft Research Asia three years ago. The MSRA required special software, bluetooth, and only worked with pairs of devices if i remember correctly. It did have one feature this doesn’t though. If you were watching a video on one phone, and brought a second phone next to it, the video would automatically span. Separate the phones, and it went back to single screen mode.

I still don’t know what the point of these things are though.
- Anonymous
  
  I think one point is how you can (re)use a few hundred bucks’ worth of old laptops instead of spending thousands of dollars on a single screen…there are lots of places like small storefronts, libraries, etc. where that’s a big enough differenece between having a display and not having one.
  
  And it also means if a component breaks or is stolen, it can be replaced.
floraldeoderant

I’m envisioning: a storefront where all the displays are behind the glass. There’s a single point where the glass is cut away and a defunct or broken iphone is rubber-cemented into the hole. Passers by can use the touch interface to control the massive patchwork graphics display. Either for art installation purposes, or to give a ‘junkyard chic’ style to a digital advertisement for the store.

Very cool stuff.
mrmambo

Here’s the link to make your own Junkyard Jumbotron:

http://jj.brownbag.me/

None of the articles include the link. What a great idea!