iPad Video Wall

It seems like my favourite device of the moment is the iPad.  First I built the QRator app which has been quite popular and well received by the UCL Grant Museum.  We even won an award for the system.

After a discussion with a few of my colleagues about new exhibition pieces for upcoming events we thought it would great to have a video wall to showcase some of our visualisations created at CASA.  Using 8 iPads and a custom application to connect them together via a centralised server, we now have a basic video wall.

The iPads connect to a server (my iMac) which in turn notifies them which video segment they have to play, then once connected the server will tell each device to start buffering the video. After a few seconds all iPads are told to play simultaneously and the result is what you see in the video above, a silly movie of myself.

The next steps for this project is to add some interactive screens so users can interact with the wall and select content that should be displayed on the wall. Also I’m also looking into different ways to charge multiple iPads while retaining the ability to sync them all with 1 cable. I’m really happy with the results, especially being a proof of concept, so once I’ve ironed out the few synchronisation bugs and added more functionality wall then maybe we will build a full size wall in the near future.