ETH Zurich : Computer Science : Pervasive Computing : Distributed Systems : Education : DS HS2010

Distributed Systems

Distinguished Term Projects 2010

As part of the Distributed Systems course held by Professor Mattern in Autumn 2010, the students were given 4 weeks to develop an Android application of their choice. The only requirement was that it had to contain a distributed component. This is a selection of distinguished projects from this course.

DroidPresenter: Andreas Tschofen, Leonhard Helminger, Mathias Bürki, Damian Karrer

DroidPresenter is the Android app for remote controlling presentations. The idea is simple: With your laptop (presumably attached to a beamer or large-screen display) you wirelessly connect to your phone and open the presentation in PDF format with the appendant PC/Mac application. The presentation is then automatically sent to the phone. Now DroidPresenter not only allows you to switch slides while you are freely moving through the room, but makes full use of the touchscreen capabilities of your Android phone by letting you use your finger as a pointer and also draw onto the slides for marking important things or adding additional information in real time. To overcome the problem of limited screen size, the displayed slide can be freely panned and zoomed on the phone. Some additional features like slide preview and a timer let you stay in full control of your presentation at any time.

djCrowd: Luchin Doblies, Alexander Grest, Moritz Hoffmann, Jost Joller, Philipp Schmid, David Stolz

Have you ever shared the experience of listening to music on your smartphones with your friends? Did you argue about which track should be listened to next, or struggle with swapping the stereo plug to the only phone containing the song you wanted to listen to? The new Android app djCrowd takes care of all these problems for you. djCrowd is an interactive distributed music player which lets you choose whether you want your phone to act as a server or as a client. Once you've started up a server on one phone (connected to your hi-fi system), your friends can use djCrowd to connect to your server. They can see the song which is currently playing, as well as the upcoming songs in the playlist. Furthermore, clients can modify this list by voting for the music they like and upload the songs they have on their phones but don't find on yours. In addition to the client software for Android, djCrowd includes a webinterface which can be accessed by non-Android devices such as iPhones or your home computer. [Android Market]

Table Pong Bluetooth Multiplayer: Yannick Stucki, Adrian Blumer, Fabian Gremper, Pascal Studerus, Lukas Manser

Discover this mixture of two classical games: The game principle is taken from Pong while the multiplayer part is inspired by Table football. This means you’ll still have the same fun of shooting the ball around the screen with your pad, but even better, you can now do so with a teammate. Table Pong features anything from 1 vs 1 to 1 vs 2 and even 2 vs 2. Each side has two pads in any match up (if you’re alone you control both of them) which are arranged in the same interleaved manner as in Table Football. This opens up Pong to a whole new dimension and lots of fun and you’ll frequently see even your own teammate get in the way. Multiplayer is handled via Bluetooth, where one player will contact the others and act as a server. Further instructions can be found in the game menu.

Schieber-Jass für Android: Patrick Tremp, Til Zäschke, Richard Bützer, Jérémie Miserez

Schieber-Jass ist eine Implementation des Schweizer Jasses, wie man ihn am Stammtisch antrifft. Gespielt wird mit original Deutschschweizer Karten lokal gegen den Computer oder über WiFi mit anderen Personen. Das Spiel unterstützt alle gängigen Formen wie Trumpf, "Obenabe", "Undenufe" und natürlich das Schieben an den Mitspieler. Flüssige 2D-Graphik und intelligente KI-Gegner machen den Jass zu einem Erlebnis. Weise werden automatisch berechnet, und die Spiellogik sorgt für die strikte Einhaltung der Regeln. Die Netzwerkkommunikation erfolgt über ein Ad-hoc-Netzwerk und toleriert etwa zeitweilige Verbindungsunterbrüche, ohne das Spiel abzubrechen. Es sind verschiedene Erweiterungen denkbar, wie etwa das Internetspiel (mit Online-Lobby), Bluetooth-Verbindungen oder ein integrierter Chatroom.