Towards streamed services for co-located collaborative groups

From both technical and social viewpoints there is great value in services that require devices (and therefore people) to be co-located. The very act of co-location brings with it entirely new dynamics and collaboration; furthermore, devices in coalition can render services and provide experiences that a single device might not be able to. In this paper we describe the motivation, design, and uses of high experience coalition-based services and outline how such services could be architecture on both the server and client sides. Extensive use of video transcoding and region-of-interest techniques - to segment and stream only portions of video frames - makes delivering experiences like “social cinema” across several co-located devices feasible. On the client side smartphone-based interactive coalition setup and control is very viable. In this paper we explore and document our functional architecture and take a closer look at the similarities and differences between OnLive and our proposed architecture and services. The rising prominence of hi-resolution LED devices together with services such as OnLive make coalition services technically viable, desirable, and worthy of both industrial and academic investigation alike.