Many experiments come with a warning, “Don’t try this at home.”
The *Junkyard Jumbotron” comes with the opposite admonition: do it yourself, at home.
The Centre for Future Civic Media, a collaboration between MIT Media Lab and Comparative Media Studies, wrote a programme that lets you take a bunch of random displays and instantly stitch them together into a large, virtual display-- simply by taking a photograph of them.
It works with laptops, smartphones, tablets --- anything that runs a web browser. It also highlights a new way of connecting a large number of heterogenous devices to each other in the field, on an ad-hoc basis.
There’s no apology to Sony for the use of “Jumbotron,” but the Junkyard Jumbotron-- a web tool that makes it really easy to combine a bunch of random displays into a single, large virtual display via the web—is worth taking a look.
