The Mobile Phone PixelSWaLL

mobile pixel wall

As much as we hate to admit it, smart phones have become somewhat of a disposable item in today’s society. People upgrade their phones constantly and simply chuck their old ones. Of course, there’s plenty of things you can do with slightly out of date phones… Here’s one we haven’t seen before — a wireless multi-phone display!

It’s called the PixelSWaLL, and according to the author,  his software can control up to 240 Android devices! To run this demo with just 9 phones, he’s using an old Apple Macbook running Windows 7 bootcamp, which sends the display info using an old Telmex router. Each phone or tablet runs the Android terminal application  using Eclipse ADT which renders OpenGL in real-time. The server application was made with Delphi 7 and uses the DSPack library to read video files in order to send them over UDP via Indy 10. It’s a bit of a mouthful to explain, but the resulting display array is pretty cool!

Time to start collecting phones…

[Thanks Axel!]

12 thoughts on “The Mobile Phone PixelSWaLL

  1. Cool! I’d like to see a much larger grid of phones.

    My one old smartphone is used as a digital wall clock. Works great especially if you the screen is OLED, meaning the black areas of the screen are really black.

  2. I’d have to try this out sometime, I’m running out of things to do with the old smartphones and tablets I’ve accumulated throughout the years… I already have 7 phones in my smartphone collection and 2 tablets so far (On top of the smartphone and tablet I use daily), with another phone that will be added in the next few weeks…

  3. With TightVNC (and maybe some others) you can open a port for only a certain portion of a screen. Combine that with a headless display and you have potentially unlimited screen resolution over unlimited devices.
    A interesting use for this was extending my screen on Windows. I did this a couple years ago on a G1 so I can’t remember the details. I used the DFMirage video hook driver to create a virtual display with unspecified size, then TightVNC was set to take a chunk of 800×600 or something, then I used android-vnc-viewer to connect to it. It was slow, small, and pretty useless, but it sure was cool. I always think about doing it again with system monitors.

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