Code the globe: interactive content for spherical multi-touch displays with simple webpages

Abstract

Although spherical displays become more and more pervasive, the design of interactive content for these displays still remains difficult as it requires most developers to get familiar with specific tools for managing the output and input. In this paper, we present a framework for developing applications for multitouch spherical displays that makes it possible to create interactive content by programming standard GUI applications, as for example interactive web pages. The principal idea is to adapt the window output and interaction input of classical GUIs outside the application. To this end, our framework consists of two standalone applications where the first one captures the window output and changes the projection via GPU shaders, and the second one adapts the input with a Node.js server and sends interaction and mouse events. In this way, the same application runs on a standard desktop, and on the spherical display. Advantages of our approach include fast prototyping, and the fact that masses of developers can create applications for spherical displays just as if it were, for example, classical web applications. We believe that our framework will contribute to making spherical displays even more pervasive in the future.