[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Aro2220:
Ideally, I would like to be able to broadcast any display (if we're dreaming, any section of any display) to any other display.

I can do that fairly well from Apple's iOS or MacOSX to an AppleTV. But, I can't go iOS to MacOSx and vice versa. I can't go from any mac device to pc. Pc to PC might be possible, but it's clunky. Android to PC - I dont know of a way. Same vice versa. I know I can use iTunes on my pc and Remote on either Android or Apple to turn it on and off and that seems to be an excellent way to manage your music system especially with iTunes Match and AppleTV.

But, if you want to teach it's hard to do that if people have to look over your shoulder. I would like to buy a couple devices, like two Nexus 7's, and be able to grab any information / control my pcs with it, kind of as a repository or to do any difficult processes with either device as well as being able to get either device send stuff back and forth.

It doesn't need to be complicated, either. Apple pretty well has the right idea. Pull (or up) a control menu of some kind, press one button and then choose the destination to start broadcasting your display. When you do that, the other device automatically starts displaying it. Since it's only on your home network we can presume you will only be able to send your displays to devices you are also on the network for. Tunnelling into other networks might be a way to connect multiple homes together...but I digress...

A display is a display. A keyboard is a keyboard. There is no reason, other than $, to build a screen that only works on one computer. Even if one computer runs Android and one runs iOS and one MacOSX and one Windows 7, just like java can have an environment in any of them (iOS?), surely you could build a way for them to send and display whatever is on the screen.

Technically, it should be very possible. There just needs to be the will.

A long time ago they thought one computer in every home would be an achievement. I'm thinking the average person is going to have, or at least have access to, a LOT of screens. It would be nice if you could actually manipulate those things. Toss this movie on one screen, toss that document on that tablet, pass that animation to a desktop screen. Use the cloud computing to keep everything connected. The last thing is processing power...to be able to have a home desktop do all your heavy lifting (ie: rendering crysis 2) and then all your other devices need to be able to do is download fast enough to display at a reasonable fps and the other device capable of sending. That's already possible on Apple. Google is already starting down that road with the Nexus Q. Logmein has already started on the cloud aspect. There are probably lots of little projects that will work for a while then fizzle out in the light of something better.

And typing on a keyboard is still infinitely better than typing on any screen or tiny keypad or weird device. A keyboard that you can specifically point at any device to control it with would be awesome. You'd just need one nice keyboard in your entire house and if you wanted to type onto your Nexus 7 or your iPad or your Nexus Prime or iPhone or Windows 7 pc -- you would just 'point' (not literally) that keyboard at the device you intend. Maybe with those neural attenuators you might be able to use slight muscle movement and maybe with a magnetometer you could also tell which way you were facing and with the location of all objects in the room you would literally just need to look toward something and it would display on a device.

Oh, like if you had something called Google Glass -- you would look at a screen and with a few commands select the screen you want and then whatever it is you want to display. Cloud servers could do the heavy processing and then stream your word processor or whatever software you like onto whatever screen you have. That way you could use Sony Vegas on your big screen tv or your iPad because it would actually be running on a remote server somewhere else and all you would need is to broadcast at a reasonable framerate.

We are literally on the verge of that being widely possible with the average man's bandwidth. Then, it doesn't matter how intensive the application is. All you need is a device that can display that stream and all the ramping up and down of processing power would be done on the servers -- computers specifically designed to be extremely efficient and powerful at central processing or graphical processing, etc.

Ideally, everyone should have their home desktops being these power computer stations. That way you would be responsible for maintaining your own cloud and worst case scenario if anything ever happened youw ould still own your files, and applications, etc. Using public cloud services like Dropbox or iCloud are convenient, but do you really want to completely take all storage and computing power out of your hands and put them into some giant conglomerate that you have no control over?

Yes, it would be more efficient but I think that's kind of like saying the world would be safer if only one army could buy, build or use any weapons. Maybe...but it would also be ripe for oppression.

Balance is the key to life.

Yes, I realize this post kind of went all over the place. Sorry about that. I still think the idea is neat.