Reminds me of Junkyard Jumbotron, which came out of MIT a few years ago. The nice thing about that is that it runs on anything with a browser (I believe), and the devices don't have to be particularly close or well aligned. I haven't tried it -- I'm only going off of what's in their demo video.
You can see them doing that in the video. The screens must be immediately adjacent and aligned orthogonally. It aligns on a finger drag from one device straight across to the other.
They've gotta have some smarts about the different bezel thicknesses for all iOS devices; I don't think finger velocity and displacement time would be accurate enough for determining the horizontal spacing.
When you say you can sync app data across devices, how do you know which sets of devices are trying to connect with each other? Because that's sort of the premise behind Bump... how does this beat that?
Similar premise, but the media applications are much more compelling. The SDK provides very precise locations of the devices relative to one another in addition to associating them to one another in a group.
I suspect this is extremely hard to do well on Android because you need to know a lot about the physical size and shape of the device. However if they limited it to say the 100 most popular devices it sould reasonable.
I still don't get what it is with the HN community battling as hard as it can to never have another Jobs, or any of the other greats. I consistently see comments that try to put people down so that they revert back to the mean.
I hate it when people who haven't built anything criticizes others for not being innovative enough anytime there is another photo-sharing app (or related vain product) here on HN. but seriously this is a really stupid idea and I wish you had directed your efforts into less silly effort. Did you really enjoy watching those images on several screens with those distorting breaks within devices?
I think you need to think one level ahead. The product is not photo sharing; it is the SDK. What they have shown is a simple application that shows what data the SDK could provide for your application. I can see this having some really cool applications in iOS/Android multi-player gaming, for example.
Also - and I know this is repeated often - this is a site for hackers, and this is a really cool hack. Maybe I'm not so smart, but it took me a while to figure out how it was being done, and I thought it was really clever.
I use photo-sharing app just as an example. But I'm referring to the larger context of people telling others to be more innovative and be involved in those world changing stuff instead of building such fleeting apps.
But yes, it does photo-sharing though not the main premise of the developer
http://civic.mit.edu/blog/csik/junkyard-jumbotron
That might be worth checking out because it uses a much different approach to achieve a similar effect.