Cloud displays for mobile users in a display cloud

Abstract

The display cloud model allows users to select local and remote programmable displays, and add them to a user specific cloud display where the user can arrange them freely. On a cloud display, the abstraction representing remote graphical content is termed a visual. It can be positioned and resized freely. Wherever a visual touches a part of the cloud display with physical displays present, the physical displays will show the corresponding graphical content of the visual. The physical displays can simultaneously show several visuals from one or many users. The display cloud approach is suitable for public environments because we do not allow user customization of the displays, a user does not have to expose any data except the actual graphical content to the display computers, and he does not have to go through the displays to do user interaction with his resources. Mobile devices have an essential role in achieving this. They provide, for each user, the means to detect displays, to add displays to the user's cloud display, to manage displays and visuals in a cloud display, and to interact with visuals. An insight is that the display cloud model is maximally decentralized between users, and maximally centralized per user. We conducted a set of experiments on a prototype using 28 display computers with up to 21 users. The results show that the prototype reacts interactively fast for each, and scales well to many users.