Running Android On Large Touch Screen Displays

32_inch_android_touch_screen_display

Forget Microsoft Surface, what do you think about having a 32-inch Android-powered touchscreen display in your living room? That possibility might not be too far off, thanks to the engineers over at SKR Technology in Japan.

Primarily a company that designs and builds digital signage, they were approached by several customers who wanted a large screen device that had multi-touch functionality similar to a smartphone. Since they frequently work with Windows, they tried building a solution around Windows 7, but it just didn’t function as smoothly as they would like. Instead they turned towards Android, but were disappointed to find out that none of their suppliers supported the OS.

Instead of scrapping the project, they build their own interface that allows an Android-powered device to interact with multi-touch displays. As you can see in the video embedded below the display works quite well, mirroring everything on the Android device’s screen.

While the product is not yet available commercially, we should see it come to market later this year. We hope to see an open source version sometime in the future as well, even if we can’t quite afford a 32” touch panel display.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNzt1SdEDu8&w=470]

24 thoughts on “Running Android On Large Touch Screen Displays

  1. Paul Bunyan’s cellphone? This could have interesting applications in HDTVs, just make the remote a lightgun/wiimote and you can use andriod apps on your TV (if you want to.)

  2. Hey, I have the same thing running in my living room (embedded in the sofa table). Wouldn’t want to miss it. Now I can look up any strange word Stephen Fry is using without having to grab my laptop first… Priceless!

  3. Not at all what I expected, but really, it would be pretty simple to pull off a standalone unit… Get one of the many dev boards out there that uses a dual core SoC (Tegra 2, Exynos, or the plain A9), build a driver board for the (I assume) 1080P display which can connect to the dev board, and you’re in business… All that’s left to do is customize Android to scale apps to 1080P correctly (since devs most likely won’t modify their apps to support such a high resolution) and you’re all set.

  4. @BobSmith
    I can give you a purpose right now: Kiosks in every imaginable place. Airports, libraries, malls, I mean the possibilities with that are quite nice. Another use would be in education where you could have kids interact with a physics simulation or a multitude of other things. If you want to do something just make an app or find one. Just my 2 cents…

  5. I agree with m1ndtr1p.

    In fact, while we’re at it, why not redo google and facebook into one website.

    Just get a computer that runs mysql. Write up a quick social page / search engine back end,probably in c, so it runs fast.

    Then make the user front end. Done!

    Throw in a custom driver so you can interface to your bank of ATM machines, that way you can group people by net worth.

    So easy, I can’t believe this stuff is on hackaday.

  6. @Eirinn

    Same reason why some OSes are ported to variety of platforms: for their fans at least. That is, because of the attachment that isn’t as much utilitarian as emotional.

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