The Smartphone as Application Server | Hacker News Reader

The Smartphone as Application Server

vijayan.ca

54 pointsmnemonik10 comments

What I don't understand is why the smartphone is the server. Naïvely, I'd expect the server to be the Raspberry Pi, and for clients to be the smartphones. Clients connect to the server and push content which the server displays on the screen. Something like X11, in other words. Looking at what the application does, I don't even think it would be that difficult to convert it to an architecture like what I described above - in essence you'd be reversing the arrows on your interaction diagram.

Can you elaborate as to why you built the server on the smartphone rather than Raspberry Pi? What does that get you? How do you get around the limitations that phone operating systems (especially iOS) impose on background processes? What's the impact on battery life?

Author here. The point of the design is that I'm treating the Pi as the display server (i.e. the client, or X11). The smartphone is the app-server because it hosts the relevant state.

The reason it's structured this way is that we want the ability to push code, logic, and data to the endpoint and have the endpoint execute it.

Consider a traditional usage scenario: your computer is the display server (web client), and the app server sits somewhere out on the cloud. The app server holds the application and the state, and you download it on the fly. The client (browser on your PC) is largely stateless, and the cloud-based server is the state carrier that ships both logic (in the form of a webpage + js) and data to the client on an as-needed basis.

In this design, the thing that's stateless is the endpoint (the thing connected to the TV). The state-carrier is the phone. The state-carrier needs to send logic and data to the client so that the client can execute it locally. This approach is in fact very natural.

Now, as you note, the actual transport details can be flexible. We _could_ design it so that the transport is handled by a small proxy that runs on the Pi. The proxy would be started when the browser session is initiated, and both the browser and the phone would connect to the proxy, and the proxy would act as mediator. But that would be an implementation detail. In the abstract, the phone would still be the server and the endpoint (the pi) would still be the client.

Fundamentally, we're starting an application on the phone, and sending parts of it to the pi for the pi to execute. The most natural model for that is for the phone to be the HTTP server (the state and logic originator) and for the pi to be the web client (the stateless device).

It's a bit counterintuitive, but if you think about it for a bit, it starts fitting together really well.

Thanks for the clarification. I think the point of confusion for me was around the word "endpoint". As a web developer, I'm so used to thinking of the phone as the "endpoint" that the notion of the phone as the app server threw me a little.

One other concern I have is input lag. You mention gaming, which can require some pretty precise input timing. Have you run into any issues around that? Or are modern wifi network generally Good Enough that lag isn't a problem?

I only had enough time to whip up the quick demo here. The responsiveness is pretty tight as far as latency goes - it "feels" like the photo on screen moves in tandem with the one under my fingers. No perceptible lag.

I wanted to try out some more interesting demos. One idea I had was to run the HexGL racing game (http://hexgl.bkcore.com/) on the endpoint, and then have the app on the phone interpret the gyro as steering and send it over to the endpoint.

However, I found that WebGL on the pi is slooooow, for both Chrome and Firefox. I don't think this is a raw power issue so much as using desktop browsers on a mobile device, where the browsers haven't been compiled with driver support for the graphics chipset (the Pi can run Minecraft just fine, so it should be able to handle a simple racing game).

My educated guess (from just the photo-viewing demo) is that the latency is good enough to support responsive gaming input.

We explored ideas around this space at Emotely and Brass Monkey. There is much yet unexplored. This approach basically gets you a WiiU/Chromecast second screen platform: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE8-TntjYB4 http://francoislaberge.com/blog/my-time-at-brass-monkey/

This is sweet. I knew this was obvious enough of an idea that other people would have had it, and potentially taken it further.

One of my longer-term thoughts on this approach is that it may extend beyond simply a "controller" notion. Ultimately, I was thinking the phone could become the sole state carrier, and all other devices (workstations, laptops, game consoles, projectors) could become stateless endpoints which are ephemerally controlled as needed.

For example, you could arrive at home, connect your phone to your home computer, and initiate a "home session" which kicks off all the 'webapps' you have defined for your home-computer environment, on your home computer. The apps are structured client/server, and they save their state back to the phone (but use the computer's processing, display, audio, etc.). When you're done, you disconnect and leave. All your state is saved to your phone, and any other computer you come across can temporarily become your "home computer".

Likewise, any computer can be your "work computer". And any game console can be "your" game console.

The phone, in this context, seems like the ultimate proxy for the individual. It travels with a person. It has access to the inputs and data in the vincinity of the individual. It can be controlled by the individual. What better place to put all of your computational state, than in there?

Anyway, this was some far-fetched, pie-in-the-sky thinking I had about the long-term implications of such an architecture.

Happy to see other people working on the concept.

I agree. We focused on the controller use case as it made for a simpler API, but it was always my interest to make it more generalized. Just perhaps through a different product that was more open and generalized.

Things like having your phone cache webapps that could be casted over LAN (thus not requiring a persistent connection), this would useful for playing say games/apps when on planes or log cabins, etc.

Or having the phone create metascreen, synchronizing multiple monitors with fullscreen webpages open that you would split up the graphics of a game or movie to run across all the screens, thus making a bigger screen.

So many possibilities. Ultimately though, I'm still on the fence to if this is the best approach vs a mixed approach of using bluetooth, zigbee, wifi, http, websockets, normal sockets, and etc all abstracted to use whatever each device has to offer.

Great write up too, by the way.

Built something like this at YC Hacks, except any device or even a webpage could function as the server and provide a real-time or REST interface. We had 5 demo apps showing off various examples, including a super cool two-factor auth demo..

Trying to explain the concept to people in 30 seconds was non-trivial.

This is neat. I have a hard time thinking of uses off the top of my head, but the idea of a no-installation phone-paired TV app has potential.

Thoughts of https://youtu.be/_mjxd47OVUI?t=57s go through my head.

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