Public displays are becoming more and more common, but are usually passive information sources. In this project, we developed the Massive Mobile Multiuser (M³) framework to allow simultaneous interaction of multiple persons with public displays through their personal mobile devices.
A particular focus of this project was to provide a low entry barrier to users - it should not take more than 30 seconds for passersby to connect to and interact with a public display. Consequently, M³ enables immediate interaction through the mobile browser without requiring prior setup on the user side, and real-time interaction suitable for fast multiplayer games. To ensure that we can meet our goal of response times below 100 ms, we performed an extensive analysis of latency sources across different devices and network connections.
The team consisted of two students from the HCI master degree programme, and one CSM master student. We used HTML5 and Javascript for development on the mobile client, and C++ for the server and game demo. We developed a live demonstration of our framework at the example of MMM Ball, a fun, simple, and fast-paced game which has already been shown to support up to 17 concurrent users. A video demonstration of MMM Ball can be found below.
MMM Ball was first presented at Evoke 2015, and won second place in the interactive competition. Peer-reviewed conference publications about M³ and MMM Ball have been presented at CHI 2016 Interactivity (https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2890232) and at PerDis 2016 (https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2915004).