CALIBRATED DEVICES. SHARED TIME. ONE CANVAS.
CALIBRATED DEVICES. SHARED TIME. ONE CANVAS.
pixelmesh turns a room full of phones into a single synchronised display. Audiences open a URL, hold up their screens, and become pixels in a room-sized canvas. Light moves through the crowd as if it were one piece of hardware.
Every phone gets a shared clock and a known position. A camera at the front of the room watches the audience and reads an optical pattern blinking on each screen, mapping the entire crowd into a coordinate grid in about thirteen seconds. From there, a controller broadcasts effects and each device renders its own frame locally. A distributed shader running across a room.
The point isn't graphics on a crowd. It's coordination made visible. Distributed systems run beneath everything we use, almost always invisibly. pixelmesh pulls one into the open and lets a room watch it behave.
Birmingham, July 2026 · 46 phones located live · 5× speed
The hardest problem is identification. pixelmesh solves it optically, with a single camera watching the entire crowd at once.
Numbers from the most recent live run, July 2026.
Each device calibrates its position into a shared coordinate grid. A central controller broadcasts effect parameters rather than pixel data, and every device computes its own output against a shared clock: a distributed shader running across the room. Low bandwidth, deterministic behaviour, and a crowd that becomes a single rendering engine.
The first public version used printed AprilTag markers for calibration. The current implementation replaces them with optically-encoded screen blinks, so audiences only need to open a URL. It has run live in Stoke, Manchester, London, and Birmingham. Real audiences, real venues, lighting nothing like the controlled conditions it was built in.
The audience isn't watching the show. They are it.
A few hundred phones snap into a single surface; light moves through the room as if it were one piece of hardware. No app, no install, no setup. Just a URL, then a moment that feels closer to physics than software.
Hosting a conference, meetup, or event? I'd love to bring pixelmesh to your venue.
Book pixelmeshMismatched, unmodified screens stitched into one display by a server-driven calibration pattern.
Audience phones as a coordinated light source, positioned by hand, back in 2011.
pixelmesh exists because coordination is invisible.
By day I lead engineering teams building systems that work at scale and under pressure. Distributed systems run beneath everything we use, yet we rarely see them behave as one. pixelmesh lets a room watch infrastructure become visible: not a product demo, an experiment in synchronisation, scale, and emergent behaviour, built solo and tested in front of real audiences.