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Comment by jojol | Hacker News Reader

Excellent work, and a great read.

What videos did you end up playing on this after your testing was complete? Do you have any recordings to share of this in action?

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Thank you! We haven’t figured out what to play on it yet actually - I think the plan is to build out all the tools so that our school can create and upload their own videos (eg. montages of students work - this is in the Design workshop after all) to display on the screen. It could be self-service even after we graduate in June.

I think a very wide game of Pong would be fun!

We did something like that with an Amiga bouncing ball demo (on linux or Macs) back in the day (two decades ago, probably)

I think it was using a wide master screen that the terminals connected to via vnc, displaying different parts of the master screen. Only three or four screens wide, though, and not optimized for user interaction. But a live app nonetheless.

Me too! Making it do interactive things is actually quite trivial since we went for the socket.io web approach rather than using something specific to video streaming. I'm imagining two QR codes on either end, players join and play a wide game of pong. Maybe with phone gyroscopes for controls.

If you want to spend more time on this I think one fun idea would be an infinite bouncing DVD logo. Just sync the location of the logo every time it bounces so all devices have a consistent view and then the individual screens can compute whether and how much of the logo to show and at which location.

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