24 February 2014
Although I can’t give too much detail about my work while I was at Samsung, there are a few tidbits that I can share now that some aspects have been made public. One key area that Samsung has focused on is multi-screen user experiences, where devices like your smartphone and TV can connect and communicate with each other. The Samsung MultiScreen SDK was released to help developers create such experiences. Check out this video to learn more about the SDK’s capabilities:
While our team didn’t work on the MultiScreen SDK, we certainly built multi-screen prototypes. And what’s common between the SDK and one of the prototypes that I built was the use of WebSockets, which is a persistent, two-way channel between a client and server for exchanging data at any time. Since multi-screen experiences require quick data exchanges, especially when two clients need to interact with one another in realtime, using HTTP requests / responses or XHR polling can cause unwanted latency.
For Node.js, there is a really nice package called socket.io that enables WebSockets. To illustrate its use, I’ve created a small demo, which you can see in action here (source). In just a few lines of code, it’s possible to have a seamless, realtime experience between your connected devices. Hopefully, this demo will inspire you to come up with some of your own multi-screen scenarios.