MUHA. A fly that crosses screens

A fly flies across your screen and buzzes at whatever the room is doing. When it reaches the edge it leaves your device — and lands on someone else's.

Made in an evening and left as it was. It still runs, but nothing here is finished.

One fly, moving left to right across the window on a wandering path. It listens to the microphone, and the louder the room the faster and busier it gets — shout at it and it panics, which is the entire joke and worth the evening on its own.

Then it reaches the edge of the screen, and instead of turning round it leaves.

There is one fly. If it is on your screen, it is on nobody else's.

The part that makes it worth keeping

Tardigrade sticker: On my way

Open the page on two devices and they register themselves in a shared list. The fly exists exactly once across all of them: when it flies off the right-hand edge of a laptop it is handed over, and a moment later it comes in from the left on a phone across the room.

The handover is a transaction, so two screens can never both claim it. Each device sends a heartbeat every fifteen seconds and is presumed gone after forty-five, and a watchdog checks every twenty seconds that the fly has not been lost with a device that closed its lid mid-flight — the failure mode of a shared fly being, of course, no fly at all.

The admin panel

Behind a small gear in the corner: the list of live devices, which one you are, a button to clear them, and a button to summon the fly to the screen in front of you. It exists because during a demo the fly is invariably on the wrong device.

Open MUHA

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