AirPlay and our multifocal future
Craig Villamor:
We can no longer presume that the content accessed through mobile devices will also be viewed on them. With AirPlay, mobile device experiences can just as easily become 10 foot lean-back experiences, negating all your assumptions about display size and bandwidth.
It’s easy to imagine a future in which we’re able to sling content from device to device, screen to screen, near, far … whether we’re collecting content from a storefront window as we walk by, or putting something we’ve found on the nearest big screen in order to talk about it with another person.
To design for this future, we need to:
- Know what’s happening (identify device roles like “control” and “display”, and use sensors)
- Let our designed experiences flex, free of biases based on today’s important devices (think of breakpoints as moments of change, rather than a way of addressing specific mobile devices’ capabilities and screen sizes)
