Ixonos Multi-Display for Android 4.4.2 with Miracast

The Ixonos Multi-Display solution has, since the previous post, been ported to Android 4.4.2 and a few features has been added in the process. It is truly medium agnostic and works over 'whatever medium' supported by the DisplayManagerService (i.e. MHL/HDMI/MiraCast etc.) of the platform. Finally applications can be moved between displays through the 'recents' menu.

The solution addresses the limitations of the Android platform when it comes to multitasking and running several apps in parallel on different displays.

The below video shows a Nexus 10 tablet running Android 4.4.2 initially connected to a TV via HDMI playing an action flying game. New input methods like track pad and game controller has been added to the System UI to provide input for the external display. This provides mouse- and game controller input events, enabling all games that supports the standard Android game controller API to be controlled from the tablet.

At a later point in time, the tablet is connected wirelessly to the TV using Miracast via a Netgear Push2TV display adapter. This enables a true cordless Multi-Display experience where users can enjoy content on a secondary screen without the hazzle of cables.

Vasile Popescu, Chief Software Engineer - Ixonos
Mikkel Christensen, Chief Software Engineer - Ixonos
Martin Siegumfeldt, Chief Software Engineer - Ixonos
Jakob Jepsen, Chief Software Engineer - Ixonos

Ixonos Multi-Display for Android

Ixonos enables its Multi-Display feature for recent generation Android - making multi-tasking easy.

Have you ever tried using the Android secondary display API's (described here) that was introduced in Android Jellybean 4.2? Using the "Presentation" class to show content from your app is quite cool, but you are still limited to to run only one activity at a time. Basically you launch a Dialog (Presentation) to the secondary display from your activity running on the main display. This is useful for certain types of apps like e.g image and Powerpoint presenters, but what about running the stock Android Browser on one display and watching YouTube on the other?

Watch the video below and see what Ixonos has created to enable true multitasking for multiple displays.

This technology is a generic solution that enables the user to run existing Android applications on either display and also to map external input devices to the given display. Also, it utilizes the new Android display manager service and is thus display agnostic, meaning that we can use any type of display, eg. HDMI or Miracast. The Multi-Display feature can be integrated with recent generation Androids (4.2, 4.3, 4.4) by our engineers.


Vasile Popescu, Chief Software Engineer - Ixonos
Mikkel Christensen, Chief Software Engineer - Ixonos
Henrik Kai, Chief Software Engineer - Ixonos