Tide is BlueBrain's Tiled Interactive Display Environment. It provides multi-window, multi-user touch interaction on large surfaces - think of a giant collaborative wall-mounted tablet. See Tide in action in this youtube video.

Tide is a distributed application that can run on multiple machines to power display walls or projection systems of any size.

Its user interface is designed to offer an intuitive experience on touch walls. It works just as well on non touch-capable installations by using its web interface from any web browser.

Tide helps users with:

• Presenting and collaborating on a variety of media such as high-resolution images, movies and pdfs.
• Sharing multiple desktop or laptop screens using the DesktopStreamer application.
• Sketching new ideas by drawing on a whiteboard and browsing websites.
• Interacting with content streamed from remote sources such as high-performance visualisation machines through the Deflect protocol. In particular all Equalizer-based applications as well as Brayns ray-tracing engine have built-in support.
• Viewing high-resolution stereo 3D streams on compatible displays (under development).

Run 'tide' from the bin folder to start the application. By default it launches three wall processes in a horizonal layout. Content can be opened from the control user interface or by opening the web interface at http://localhost:8888.

On a touch wall, click the rocket icon on the left control bar to browse for contents and applications. Touch points are received via the TUIO protocol on port 1701. To simulate a touch interface, build and run the SimpleSimulator application or download any client from TUIO. On a smartphone, search for TuioPad app.

For more detailed information refer to the User Guide.

The application can be entirely controlled from the web interface or even using direct REST API calls. Simply drag and drop a file to upload it to the wall.

Basic procedure on Linux / OSX:

git clone https://github.com/BlueBrain/Tide.git
mkdir Tide/build
cd Tide/build
cmake -GNinja ..
ninja

The master branch always contains the latest development features (see Changelog). To build a stable release checkout its tag:

git checkout 1.2.2

Tide uses a set of common CMake modules to help with the configuration and handling of dependencies. To install required system packages on Ubuntu (apt-get) or OSX (macports) run:

cmake .. -DINSTALL_PACKAGES=1

For detailed instructions on how to build Tide on a specific platform refer to Building Tide.

Tide is the direct successor of DisplayCluster at BlueBrain. Most of the code has been rewritten based on Qt's Qml2 engine and multithreaded operations for greatly optimized performance and stability.

It offers a modern alternative to Sage/Sage2 built on proven and efficient technologies (C++11, Qt5, MPI).

The full documentation is available at bluebrain.github.io