Run the Openframe display in any web browser

[iangilman]

I love the concept of Openframe and the art that people have submitted to https://openframe.io/stream. I'd love to be able to use my existing displays (the living room television, the extra monitor connected to my computer, etc.) as Openframe devices.

I'm imagining I would log myself in to this web app on the device and there would be a "player" button that would take me to a page that's just showing whatever I've chosen to display. I can then use the web app on my phone to update what's playing on the device that's running the player page.

This is probably also the quickest route to supporting the Electric Objects devices, as long as Giphy continues to run their service, at least, and would be an easy on-ramp for courting those users. In the case of that device, you'd need to be able to produce a unique player URL the user can enter into the device, since there's no keyboard for actually logging in with.

[jmwohl]

Thanks for the suggestion! Interestingly, the first prototype version of Openframe worked like this, using a separate browser page as the 'player.' We moved away from this because we didn't want to be limited to artwork types that could run in the browser — we wanted to keep the artwork 'format' open-ended, and let anyone create extensions that could play any type of artwork. (e.g. openFrameworks and processing sketches, etc.)

That said, in practice most of the artworks that people have added and wish to display can be run in a browser. So having a browser-based frame option is still a good idea, even if some artwork formats wouldn't be playable.

We did start work a while back on a way to pair a frame with an account based on a pairing code rather than login, which works like a unique URL. This could work well for both a physical frame running on a Pi or a 'virtual frame' running in a browser window.

[iangilman]

Excellent, and yes, I agree that it's great that the "real" frame can run anything, and it's also still quite useful to allow the "virtual" frames to run what they can.

[jvolker]

I was wondering if most of the code of Raspberry Pi client could be used to write such a web client. I thought, ideally there would be a JS client library/module that could be implemented and shared by the Raspberry Pi client as well as the web client. Then most of the client code would have to be maintained only in one place.

More opportunities this idea could bring:

• display captions with author and title as an overlay
• create smooth transitions between artworks

[iangilman]

I'd still love to see this happen! BTW, meanwhile I made this website that kind of has a similar idea:

http://www.artywidget.com/