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Community & Business Groups

Second Screen Community Group

The mission of the Second Screen Community Group (CG) is to explore, incubate, and define interfaces that enable new form factors and usages for multi-display and multi-window computing user experiences on the Web. The scope of work for this Community Group extends beyond the current scope of the Second Screen Working Group (WG). Given wider support and adequate stability, we plan to migrate the proposals generated in this Community Group to an appropriate W3C Working Group for further contributions and formal standardization.

webscreens/

Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time

Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.

final reports / licensing info

date name commitments
Presentation API Licensing commitments
Presentation API Licensing commitments

drafts / licensing info

name
Presentation API

Chairs, when logged in, may publish draft and final reports. Please see report requirements.

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Enabling new multi-display and multi-window experiences

I’m happy to announce the new Second Screen Community Group Charter has been approved and is formally operational from 1 Jan 2020 onwards.

As part of this rechartering, we welcome two new incubations into this group:

This proposal aims to give web developers information about the set of connected physical displays, and considers additional display properties that may be useful beyond the current Screen interface.

The ability to open and move windows across the full set of connected displays is unstandardized and the current behavior is inconsistent between implementers. This proposal aims to give web developers standard means to manage their web content in modern windowing environments.

Please join me in welcoming these new computing user experience enablers into this group.

The Second Screen Community Group Is Reborn

At TPAC 2013, the Second Screen Community Group was created to incubate an idea of making secondary screens first-class citizens on the Web. The Community Group produced an early version of the Presentation API specification that was used as a starting point for the Second Screen Working Group‘s formal standards work that commenced in 2014. The API that started its life in this Community Group is now implemented in a major browser and is advanced on the Recommendation Track.

Encouraged by the great feedback from the wider community, this Community Group was rechartered in September 2016 to do further exploratory work. Specifically, the group was chartered to incubate and develop specifications of network protocols that implement the Presentation API and the Remote Playback API.  The renewed mission of this Community Group is to enable protocol-level interoperability, encourage more implementations, and to establish complementary specifications.

Join the Community Group to shape the future of the web-connected screens around you!

Transitioning the Presentation API to the Second Screen Presentation Working Group

The Second Screen Presentation Working Group was chartered a couple of months ago at W3C, thanks to the support of W3C members, especially those participating in this Community Group. As described in its charter, the mission of the Working Group is to take the Presentation API specification along the Recommendation track up to its final publication as a Web standard.

To ease the transition and provide a concrete starting point for the Working Group, the Community Group published an updated version of the Presentation API as final report yesterday. This report includes the outcomes of recent discussions within the Community Group while the Working Group was being created.

The Community Group will now cease its work on the Presentation API specification and let the Working Group take it from there. Please note that the Community Group remains active though! It will typically explore potential future work items that are not yet in scope of the Working Group.

Call for Final Specification Commitments for Presentation API

On 2014-12-02 The Second Screen Presentation Community Group published the following specification:

This is a call for Final Specification Commitments. To provide greater patent protection for this specification, participants in the Second Screen Presentation Community Group are now invited make commitments under the W3C Community Final Specification Agreement by completing the commitment form. Current commitments are listed on the Web. There is no deadline for making commitments.

If you have any questions, please contact the group on their public list: public-webscreens@w3.org. Learn more about the Second Screen Presentation Community Group.

Dogfooding the Presentation API

Dominik, Anssi, Louay and I have been working on a series of demos to experiment with the Presentation API and hopefully iron out edge cases in the API early on.

Demos that have been assembled so far:

  • The initial video sharing demo that lets one present a video on a second screen using an HTML video player.
  • The <video> sharing demo that investigates using the HTMLMediaElement interface to control a video presented on a second screen.
  • The HTML Slidy remote demo that takes the URL of a slide show made with HTML Slidy and presents it on a second screen, turning the first screen into a slide show remote.
  • The Fraunhofer FOKUS’ Competence Center Future Applications and Media (FAME) has also been working on a number of implementations of the Presentation API as part of FAMIUM, an end-to-end prototype implementation for early technology evaluation and interoperability testing introduced by FAME.

Different types of second screens are supported depending on the demo considered, using custom version of Web browsers, browser extensions, etc. All demos fallback to opening the content in a separate browser window.

We will try to keep these demos aligned with the evolutions of the Presentation API, and complete the Presentation API demos page with additional ones over time. Feel free to share demos or suggestions on the group’s mailing-list!

Call for Final Specification Commitments for Presentation API

On 2014-07-29 The Second Screen Presentation Community Group published the following specification:

This is a call for Final Specification Commitments. To provide greater patent protection for this specification, participants in the Second Screen Presentation Community Group are now invited make commitments under the W3C Community Final Specification Agreement by completing the commitment form. Current commitments are listed on the Web. There is no deadline for making commitments.

If you have any questions, please contact the group on their public list: public-webscreens@w3.org. Learn more about the Second Screen Presentation Community Group.

First Draft of Presentation API published by Second Screen Presentation Community Group

On 2014-07-29 the Second Screen Presentation Community Group published the first draft of the following specification:

Participants contribute material to this specification under the W3C Community Contributor License Agreement (CLA).

If you have any questions, please contact the group on their public list: public-webscreens@w3.org. Learn more about the Second Screen Presentation Community Group.

Second Screen Video Sharing Use Case Demo Released

Intel’s OTC has released code and binaries for the video sharing use case demo online on the webscreens github project:

(edit 16.6.2014, URL updated) http://webscreens.github.io/demo/

This demonstration provides an example of the video sharing use case that is listed as one of the important use cases for Presentation API.  It is similar to the demo that was shown during the the W3C TPAC Session.

Using the binaries from the page, or building your own version of Chromium with the provided patches applied, you can get an impression of what using Presentation API might look like and the sort of new usage scenarios that it enables. It’s also possible to experiment and build your own examples.

More details can be found on the demo page.