THE BIG SCREEN WEB & MOBILE INTERACTION

PROJECT Year: 2016

The big screen was a college project that solved a problem with exposure of a green district in the city of Rotterdam where they experimented with building different types of energy neutral houses. This project is eventually highlighted by the university (link).

For this project we designed and built a prototype that displayed an interactive and informative “tour” on a big screen in the middle of this green district that was controllable with a mobile phone.

The project included two designers and two developers. The stakeholder of the project was CHV (Concept House Village) and they provided us with feedback. During ten weeks we had to come up with an idea, concept and first prototype.

COMPETENCES

  • Development
    • JQuery & JQuery mobile
    • SQL
    • PHP
    • HTML/CSS
  • Creating connectivity through a database
  • Event driven website that functions as a display

PROCESS

The first few weeks were almost completely devoted to brainstorming and pitching ideas among each other. An idea emerged victorious; to create a big screen that was interactable with some sort of remote device.

As A technical developer within the team, I looked into various technique’s. From bluetooth to infrared. These technologies were a little far from my skillset however. I started looking into what was closest to me; web technologies. As a means to save this interaction I used A Database. A much used approach nowadays in application like spotify to record the play status on a account regardless of the device.

With the database set up, I started work on the prototype for the display for the big screen. This was the first element we could show off in a demo. With this done and the other developer creating the front-end of the remote, I started creating the backend for the mobile “remote control”. Catching event and storing them in the database. After this was done I created a timed loop to read the database latest record and convert these event identifier into behaviour that the screen acted upon.

At the end of our term I went on to help demo the final prototype, which was exciting and loads of fun at the same time.