Downloads

The Urban Screen Project

This software allows you to upload photographs from mobile phone to be displayed on a screen or data show as a  dynamic collage – it works well at public events where photos of guests can be uploaded to form an interactive social document.

How to download and install Urban Screen software

1)    Download the software  by clicking on the highlighted UrbanScreen.jar file at the bottom of the page.

2)    You can store the UrbanScreen.jar file anywhere on your computer.
 
3)    By default the program is reading any images from the folder where the UrbanScreen is being run from. You can change this by selecting "browse" under the "picture Location" area.

4)    For efficiency its best to set the "Picture Location" to a folder that will only contain the received images, (avoids the Urban Screen having to scan unnecessary files).
 
5)    You can change the type of screen that displays your images to either "Grid" or "Collage" from the main display configuration panel and clicking drop down box next to the “select Urban Screen” option.

6)    You can also change the time that images are randomly populated to the display also from the main display configuration panel by altering the “picture rotation timer”. This can be a value set between 200mS and 5 sec.

7)    You can also change the colour of the Background by pressing the “set colour” button and selecting the colour from the dialog popup box, or you can set a background image by pressing the “Find Image” button and navigating to the image using the popup file chooser.  The images being read from the picture location will populate over that background image.


8)    You can also set a time where all the received images will disappear and it will just repaint back to the background image by changing the slider under the “Background Refresh Timer” area on the main configuration panel.

9)    You can also start a Bluetooth thread that listens for incoming Bluetooth connections by pressing the “Start” button on the main config panel.  The Bluetooth thread constantly accepts incoming pictures and puts them in the same folder that the Urban Screen watching. The thread can also be stopped and started as needed. To run Bluetooth thread you need to have a Bluetooth USB dongle connected and the appropriate drivers installed from the manufacturer (should come with the dongle in a CD).  For laptops the inbuilt Bluetooth can also just be used as long as it is turned on (see your laptop user manual to do this).


10)     Please note: if you do start the Bluetooth thread and then change the picture location, the thread will still be sending images to the previous destination folder. So you will need to stop the thread then start it again if it is to send to the new destination folder.

11)    You don't have to have the Bluetooth thread started to run UrbanScreen, you can just cycle through images already on the computer, however then no new images will appear. When everything is setup as desired press "okay" to start the UrbanScreen, secondary config panel appears.

12)    For collage you can change the min and max sizes of the image which will scale smaller or larger images to fit in screen, and grid you can change the number of columns and rows that the images will appear in the display grid. Once the settings for the secondary panel have been set. The urban screen will start in a window.

 
CONTROLS: Press [Enter] to toggle between full screen mode and window mode.
Presss [C] to bring up the config panel to change the display settings
Press[S] to pause the screen at its current state (stops the picture cycling)
Press[P] to play the screen again (if it is paused will unpause it).