Invited talks: Collaborative video playback on a federation of tiled mobile projectors enabled by visual feedback

Pico projectors are expected to become increasingly popular in the near future, in particular when embedded in mobile devices such as smart phones, portable media players and digital cameras. The average consumer, seeking more features and attracted to all in one portable devices, will find such integrated devices very appealing. However the resolution and the brightness provided by integrated mobile projectors are much lower than what standard projectors commonly offer. Our collaborative scheme based on our synchronization technique provides a means of increasing resolution and brightness for the video projected by such mobile devices, significantly enhancing the viewing experience for the user. In this talk, I will present a collaborative video playback on mobile projectors, set out and managed only through visual feedback. More specifically I will introduce a camera-based video synchronization algorithm that allows a federation of projection-enabled mobile devices to collaboratively present a full video stream that consists of multiple sub streams, each streamed to a different mobile device constituting the ensemble. Since the synchronization does not use any wireless network infrastructure, it is independent of network congestion and connectivity. For this project we combined our synchronization method with existing distributed registration techniques to demonstrate a synchronized video stream for a collaborative federation of four projectors arranged in a 2×2 array.