Android Canvas: Building One of the World's Largest Interactive Data Visualization Experiences

What you'll learn

Have you wondered what would it be like to translate a traditional Android app experience to an 80-inch touch surface? In the process of making a data visualization tool, VizInteract, to work with large displays, Supratim Chakraborty managed to find great insights and answers to the former question. Due to the need for vanilla AOSP to send a video stream and read sequential multi-touch events, a traditional Android Tablet with HDMI display out cannot serve the purpose. To solve this problem, their team decided to use the Android-x86 project and an external Infrared touch screen overlay to run Oreo on a large display and support 12 touch points. In this talk, Supratim will share how the Android-x86 kernel was modified to add driver support for an IR touch overlay, learnings from building multi-touch experiences on unnaturally large surfaces and how that poses interesting challenges. the key changes in the UX of affording dragging, rotation, pinch to zoom and scale gestures on an 80-inch tablet vs. a regular Android tablet, and the constraints of working with Canvas API and a large amount of numerical data processing.

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