Single and multiscreen a unified model Sample Clauses

Single and multiscreen a unified model. Instead of having different solutions for single screen and second screen applications we developed a concept where an application is independent of how many screens are involved and can in fact dynamically react to changes in the amount and types of screens attached to the application. In concept the idea is simple but we found out it requires people to make shift in the way they think about how they view these types of applications. Writing distributed applications (Image 7- left), like second/multiscreens applications, is always more difficult. This is understandable since most of the teaching materials and tools programmers have used over the last decades focussed on non-distributed forms. Also it’s more natural for programmers to think about single user applications instead of thinking about applications being used by multiple people at the same time. So what we try to do is make a distributed multiscreen application look like a non-distributed application (Image 7 - right). We do this by running the application on the server and introducing the idea of screens. The framework will do all the complex work to make it behave distributed while the developer can think in the more traditional development model. Image 7: Distributed application (left), server side application with screens (right). This sounds like a slight change but has huge effects on both what we can do and the technical implementation since now the application is able to see and interact with all the users in a unified way. From the developers point of view this now means that there is only one application that is always running (even if there nobody is watching) and that screens, users and devices changes are all just signals to this running application that it can and has to react on. This way it becomes possible for an application to grow from providing content from one screen to many when more users start watching and adapt to what each screen is capable of (Image 8). Image 8: Lifecycle of an application instance where users and devices are joining. Creating this unified model for the developer does of course mean that the underlying framework (the toolkit) has to resolve many technical communication and synchronization problems since in reality the application is not fully running inside the server but involved many HTML5 browsers at clients, HbbTV clients, remote controls and even gestural interfaces. We will expand on this later in this document but from the unified application vi...