Pinch: an interface that allows you to create video walls with smartphones and tablets

Researchers at Tokyo University of Technology have developed Pinch, a Wi-Fi-based interface that allows you to connect several iOS devices together to form a large screen as if they were pieces of a puzzle.

Tokyo University of Technology is working on Pinch, a software that takes advantage of the wireless technology of smartphones and tablets to create video walls on the fly between different devices. When the user places their thumb and index finger on two adjacent screens and pinches them, screens link. Screens can be freely aligned, vertical u horizontal.

Pinch keeps touch devices synchronized over Wi-Fi and provides relative size and orientation data so you can move the image or zoom in, achieving an equivalent movement on the rest of the devices. Mobile devices with screens of different sizes, such as smartphones and tablets, They can go together to form a display interface.

According to Takashi Ohta, associate professor at Tokyo University of Technology, “This Pinch interface we have developed is used to create applications that make devices react when both have been connected, so they work together. In the case of a graphical application, when devices recognize they are connected, can display an image as if it were a single screen.

Ohta assures that Pinch can be the basis of a musical experience, where the different devices are connected in a horizontal position, with the result that “can continue playing music for a long time”. The Japanese university professor sees Pinch as a tool that allows communications “fun”, where people gather, place your devices close to each other, and communicate ideas and images in novel ways. Other avenues could also include mobile music experiences, advertising and sharing photos.

The Tokyo University of Technology team has signaled that it is offering Pinch to developers, hoping they can “do something with it.”

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