Skip to main content

Screen sharing of the future: where will we be looking at photos and videos in 100 years' time?

Picture the scene: bright neon vectors, 2D images flying around in thin air, Tom Cruise waving his hands around - yes it’s Minority Report, and the iconic ‘gesture interface’. At the time this vision of the future seemed so far beyond modern technology we called it science fiction. However, the idea that any surface can be a screen is no longer as far-fetched as it once seemed.

This tech is moving quickly into the home.  LG recently showed a 64 inch screen at CES 2017 called Wallpaper.  LG now has a screen which is just 1mmthick and can be attached to a wall with magnets. In under one year technology has gone from curved screen TVs to screens that can be rolled up like a piece of paper. Truly incredible.

By 2018 it is estimated that there will be around 759 million TV sets connected to the internet globally. This figure represents about 25% of the world’s TVs. By 2019, more than 50% of TV households in Japan, the US, the UK,France and Germany will have Smart TVs, according to the IHS TV Sets Intelligence Service.

We’re surrounded by screens everywhere we go. From the TV, to your laptop, tablet, or phone. And connecting them all is the Internet.

So, it seems all the parts are there:  a screen or something plugged into it that can display images or video that it gets from somewhere else, a device in your hand, or in your lap, that gives you instant feedback the moment you touch or slide your finger across it, and a wifi network in your house that connects it all.

But there is one major hurdle stopping you from having your own Minority Report style show.  Sharing media across all of these screens and devices: TVs, smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches, is not easy. This is because they are made by many of different companies. Some have features which allow for ‘cross-device’ compatibility: send video from your Samsung phone to your Samsung TV, send photos between Apple devices using Airdrop. But what about ‘cross-manufacturer’ compatibility? Well we are not quite there yet.

There are hardware solutions like Chromecast, Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV. However, all these require the app, or an extension to the app, to be compatible with your content. Screen-mirroring is one option, but forget about replying to that text, or alert, or notification from Facebook or Twitter, once you’re doing it - screen-mirroring means you’ll have to do it on both screens at once.

There are standards slowly being developed. Samsung’s Tizen system supports various types of DLNA, Miracast and DiAL screen sharing protocols across their range. LG have utilise both WebOS and Netcast. Sony is producing its own platform, as well as a Google TV variant. On top of that (literally, over-the-top or OTT) you have Google’s Chromecast, Roku, Apple TV, Amazon’s Fire TV, and a host of other generic TV plug-in stick and boxes. But none of these solutions are independent and put the user at the centre. What’s needed now is something that centres the media experience on the user, around their most familiar computer interface.

Enter the new kid on the block, Playora. The basis of this new technology and app is that it gives the user the ability to touch something on one screen, and have that appear on another screen without fuss, wires or layers of menus.  And that screen doesn’t have to be in the same room - or even the same country!

Now imagine this: you’re in the Valley of the Kings, in Egypt. The majestic peak of the Great Pyramid is to the left, and amazingly, impossibly, there are hardly any other tourists around. The sun is just setting... you have the perfect shot: you, the Sun, and 4500 years of mystery. Click. That’s it… the best selfie you’ve ever taken! Then… swipe, press, swipe, press… that selfie is instantly on your Mum’s tablet back home in Italy. She’s just come home from work, she has some friends round (they’re all drinking espressos)... she sees the pic - gets all excited of course - and with the touch of a button sends it to her smart TV in the living room, where they’re all sitting. Much joy all around!

Picture another scenario: you and your friends all have Smart TVs - you’re out socialising all the time, round each other’s houses. WhatsApp is a big part of organising your social life, a great place for banter, and a cool channel for sharing pics - but those pics from that boat party last night... well, they just have to be shared on the big screen. Your friends all have different makes and models of Smart TVs… but that’s not a problem: you just open up Playora! Swipe, press, swipe, press... voila! It’s on all their TVs at the same time… and your WhatsApp group goes crazy!

Who knows where we go next! With Google recently filing a patent to the US Patent & Trademark Office for what they are calling an “intra-ocular device” that lens may one day become a tiny, injectable transparent screen that lives in your eye and is connected to your phone by Bluetooth - making it possible to share your photos and videos directly into someone’s eyes, essentially creating a personal 3D cinema and built in virtual reality unit all in one, leaving Minority Report to dust!

ABOUT PLAYORA
Playora is raising £300,000 crowdfunding right now on Crowdcube, check out our pitch and see how you can buy a chunk of equity in the company that’s making science fiction science fact: https://www.crowdcube.com/playora

Founded by BAFTA winning serial technical entrepreneur Matt Spall, Playora is the trading name of Invisiplay Limited. The company was formed with the specific purpose of making it easier to use, so called, ‘Smart’ technology for entertainment by people left behind by the digital divide.

http://www.playora.com/
by Matt Spall, Playora
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

In Seach of Sea Dragons - Matthew Myerscough ****

It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting.  Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...
Post a Comment
Read more

Robot-Proof - Vivienne Ming ****

As Vivienne Ming makes apparent, there seem largely to be two views of AI's pros and cons, both of which are almost certainly wrong. It's either doom-saying 'It'll destroy life as we know it' or Pollyanna-ish 'It'll do all the boring work and we can all be wonderfully creative and live lives of leisure.' Instead, Ming gives us a clear analysis of the likely trajectory for the workplace, particularly for the IT industry. She describes three 'equally flawed, intellectually lazy strategies' to deal with the impact of AI. The first is substitution and deprofessionalisation, using AI to allow cheaper 'AI-augmented technicians' to replace more expensive professionals, producing more low wage jobs and fewer mid-range. This does save money but leaves a company at risk of being easily outcompeted. The second is what Ming describes as the '"A-Player" Hunger Games', the approach favoured by Silicon Valley. This sees the growing rif...
Post a Comment
Read more