rob.rho.org.uk

Here’s a quick demo I’ve put together, showing the RaspPi running as a VNC client:

The setup is a slightly unusual one; instead of the client connecting to the server, it runs in listen mode, and the server initiates the connection. This allows the RaspPi to be used as a kind of shared, network display. The software on the RaspPi end is TightVNC, which is available in the Debiam ARM repository. On the server side, I used Vine Server, as the built-in server on Lion doesn’t support reverse connections (if you want to use the normal client/server arrangement, the built-in server is fine).

The reason that VNC supports this back-to-front arrangement is interesting in itself. ORL (later AT&T Labs Cambridge), the birthplace of VNC, also took a significant interest in location-aware computing, firstly with the Active Badge, which could track users to the granularity of a room, and then with the Active Bat, which could do so within a few centimetres. I worked at the lab for a year before starting my PhD (which they sponsored), in the project exploring the sort of applications you could build with this sort of technology.

One of the simplest and most effective was display teleporting. If you wanted to show someone your screen, you just held your Bat (or, in earlier versions, your Badge) against their monitor and pushed a button. Hey presto, via the magic of VNC reverse connection, there it was. Even though this application hasn’t exactly become ubiquitous, the reverse connection mode that was added to VNC to support it has remained a standard and useful feature. The location-aware technology lives on as well.