Photowall for Chromecast

The launch of the Google Cast SDK and Chromecast means anyone can develop applications that take advantage of the biggest screen in the house - the TV.

We got excited about using the TV as a place for people to collaborate, so we started tinkering with ways for people to play with photos using their phones and tablets - like an interactive slideshow. The experiment became Photowall for Chromecast, a new Chrome Experiment that lets your friends collaborate and display images in real time on the TV.

I came up with the overall system concept and design, managed development between Google internal processes and our external vendor and delivered the overall project with my team-mates at Creative Lab. After the launch I wrote a Google Developers Blog post about the system, and took part in a live-streamed video interview for Google's Developer Advocate team.

Users launch Photowalls using a dedicated Android & iOS app, decorating and sending their photos to the wall via a desktop and mobile web interface to an App Engine application. Communication between browsers in the same "rooms" happens over a secure websocket connection, served from a dynamically-provisioned fleet of Compute Engine VMs. If the user chooses, the system processes all the photos from the wall into a video and uploads it as a private keepsake in the user's YouTube account, once the wall has been closed.

Press/media coverage in Engadget, The Verge, The Next Web.