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.

by Matt Spall, Playora

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...