Skip to Content
Uncategorized

Sharing the Big Screen from Your Smartphone

Large screens could display content simultaneously from different devices, using a startup’s new software.
October 2, 2012

There’s countless ways to share content and collaborate on projects with friends and coworkers who are located far away. But what about with a group of people all in the same room? There might be a big TV, a video projector and ten mobile devices present, and still people are usually left scratching their heads. 

A Denver-based startup, Mersive, launched a product today to simplify this interaction, and make higher-quality displays easier to access. Its software, Solstice, allows anyone to beam content from their tablet, laptop or mobile device to a larger display or set of displays, and it allow groups of people to share the same screen simultaneously. Showing off their product today at the Silicon Valley conference DEMO, Mersive demonstrated how five people could collaborate and share from their individual devices across a single, large screen, or stretched out onto two. The software replaces expensive and cumbersome video input hardware that’s now usually required to align pixels to allow for screen sharing from different devices. Instead, it aims to create a “single pixel landscape.” 

Right now, several U.S. government agencies and the large defense contractor Halliburton, where there are command centers, are trialing Solstice. But Mersive co-founder Christopher Jaynes has a bigger vision of democratizing access to screens everywhere. For example, in sports bars, patrons could post their running commentary to the game on one of the televisions. Or in airports, two traveling colleagues could together build a last-minute Powerpoint on that unwatched TV in the corner. “Our displays are not part of our shared infrastructure,” says Jaynes. “This makes them probably the largest untapped, unconnected infrastructure in the world today.”

Mersive, founded in 2006, has an interesting history. It grew out of Jaynes’s research at the University of Kentucky, and its funding so far includes an investment from the CIA-backed venture firm In-Q-Tel and a grant from the National Science Foundation. Its other products are also aimed at lowering the costs of high-end audio visual technology by replacing hardware components with computational software power. 

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language

A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.