Cucumbis Presentation App
Cucumbis lets users connect their phones to a browser on other devices to show and control a presentation in it. This allows to show presentations on other devices without the hassle of hooking up the presentation device to a screen or projector.
The project aimed to make connecting presentation devices easier. The Cucumbis system allows the user to display PDF presentations from an android device (presenter) on another device (renderer) and remotely flip through the slides. The renderer can be any device that has a browser, e.g. a laptop that is hooked up to a projector. This makes it possible to use a single laptop to display presentations while several presenters can provide and control the presentations from their phones.
To pair a presenter with a render, the Cucumbis website is opened on the render. This website contains a QR code that is scanned with the Cucumbis Android app on the presenter device. Afterwards a PDF presentation is selected in the app and will be displayed on the renderer. The page of the presentation can be changed with a swipe on the presenter device.
Design Process
- Observation of presentations in lectures and occurring problems
- Interview potential users about presentations and their expectations of a product like this
- Affinity diagramming of requirements and finding design solutions
- Build a prototype with the essential functionality
- Focus group that tries and discusses the prototype
- Improve user interface
- Create visual design alternatives and ask for opinions
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Focus group discussing use cases and a prototype
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Collection of requirements and potential solutions
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High fidelity mockups with several visual designs
Implementation
- The Backend consists of a Ruby on Rails app that is hosted on Heroku. It delivers the website to renderers including a QR code that contains a session ID.
- Presentation files are uploaded to Amazon S3.
- The Android app makes http-calls to the backend to change slides.
- The command to change slides are send to the renderers through WebSockets. We used Pusher to add this technology.
Research Paper
A research paper has been written by the team about the results of the project. The paper was published and presented at the SIDeR conference 2014 in Stockholm.