Card-Stunt as a Service: Empowering a Massively Packed Crowd for Instant Collective Expressiveness

Excerpted from "Card-stunt as a Service: Empowering a Massively Packed Crowd for Instant Collective Expressiveness" from MobiSys 2017, Proceedings of the 15th Annual ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, with permission. https://dl.acm.org/ citation.cfm?id=3081357 © ACM 2017. Imagine a densely packed crowd with a common voice, such as people in a candlelight vigil or a protest. We envision an innovation through mobile computing technologies to empower such crowds. We present Card-stunt as a Service (CaaS), a mobile service allowing them to instantly create a massive collective visualization by simply holding their phones up. The key challenge is to achieve instant, infrastructurefree, decimeter-level localization of individuals in a massively packed crowd, within a low latency. CaaS addresses the challenges by mobile visible-light sensing and scalable constrained optimization. Within less than a minute, each person is given individualized pixels so that they can do their part in the overall visualization*.