merhl

The iPad Table.

With my new role as Dir. of Research and Development at Universal Mind we’re investigating a lot of really cool ideas. One that we wanted to explore more was the multi device communication across several iPads. So we thought the best way to showcase that was to build a small table of iPads, so thats what we did.

The table’s made up of 15 iPads all connected to the same wireless connection, the iPads are not hardwired into any network. We have a small wireless router on its own private network relaying the communication to each iPad. Each iPad is listening to those messages and then reacts accordingly when asked to do something.

The great thing about the application running on each iPad is that it makes for a truly configurable set up. With the iPhone application controlling the iPads, we can do several things like change the background color and duration to easily fade colors, or reset the experience to quickly close all the applications. We can also add the functionality to change the array configuration so you can set up the display in any formation. For example, we have a 5×3 set up, but could change to a 1×15 set up with all the iPads in a single line if we wanted.

Update: The great people over at tuaw.com did a great write up of the table!
http://www.tuaw.com/2012/11/18/multi-ipad-table-moves-from-concept-to-reality/

15. November 2012 by merhl
Categories: Contextual Design, iPad, iPhone, R&D, UMLabs, Universal Mind, UX | 16 comments