Comment by kingosticks | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kingosticks | Hacker News Reader

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I really like how they transition between different screens so seemlessly with guestures (and also voice commands). I'd like to be able to do something similar on my phone so rather than clicking the chromecast icon and selecting which device, I'd like to swipe/flick towards the device I want to use. And ideally I'd like to expand (sorry) this to non-chromecast stuff like Spotify Connect (or MPD etc). Is there anything out there like that for Android? Some kind of location/orientation aware "casting" helper?

Relatedly I wish there was less of a delay when trying to cast to the TV. Perhaps it's that, rather than the extra button clicks, that disrupts the flow so much. It's not like my smart TV hasn't got a powerful processor and a super-fast internet connection - why am I still seeing loading screens?!

Speaking about transition of graphical applications from one device to another, I think this is a rather difficult problem in itself. The only project I'm aware of, which tries to enable that in a seamless way, is the Arcan display server. I remember a short clip from the development blog [1], where a window with a running retro game is pulled to the edge of the screen and appears immediately on another device nearby [2]. Unfortunately Arcan is pretty niche and I doubt that will change in the foreseeable future. Using voice commands to control, where your applications is running, would then be relatively easy. Swiping in that direction, while pretty cool, is much harder, as you would need to locate both involved devices.

[1] https://arcan-fe.com/2020/12/03/arcan-versus-xorg-feature-pa...

[2] https://video.wordpress.com/embed/G3vQbGS0?preloadContent=me...

> I really like how they transition between different screens so seemlessly with guestures (and also voice commands).

The greatest part of this is that they make it look seamless and unselfconscious. In most shows (even sci-fi ones) this is always exaggerated as in "look at how we move our hands on this futuristic surface". In Expanse? It's just an integrated part of what they do. They flick, and swipe, and hold stuff sideways, they drop phones, phones are cracked, and it's never "oh, look carefully at what I'm doing".

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