The Meta Portal was a smart display with a camera that followed you around the room, sold for video calling, discontinued when Meta’s priorities moved. What’s left is a large population of capable devices — decent screens, speakers, microphones, an ARM SoC running Android — sitting in cupboards because the service they were built around no longer matters.
Wormhole Display, covered by Hackaday on September 18, is an APK that turns one into a wireless AirPlay display for Apple devices, using Android’s native codecs to handle the stream.
Why this is an interfaces story and not just a hack
Sideloading an app onto an abandoned device is a small thing. The pattern it represents isn’t.
Smart devices are screens plus sensors plus a service, and only the service dies. A Portal still has a good display, a wide-angle camera with tracking, an array of microphones and speakers, and a processor that can drive all of it. What stopped working is a business decision. Everything that made it interesting as hardware is intact.
For artists and interaction designers this matters practically. The components in a discontinued smart display — a camera that tracks faces, far-field mic array, a screen, audio out, networking, all in one enclosure with a power supply — would cost real money and real integration work to assemble from parts. Secondhand, these devices sell for very little, precisely because they’re seen as dead.
A functioning route to running your own software on them converts a dead product into a cheap, complete, sensor-equipped display node. That’s an appealing base for gallery pieces, distributed installations and any project that needs several screens that can see and hear.
The catch
Repurposing is only as durable as the door left open. This works because the Portal runs Android and can be persuaded to sideload. Plenty of abandoned hardware is locked tight, and the lesson manufacturers appear to have drawn from projects like this is to lock harder rather than to open up on discontinuation.
There’s also a privacy dimension worth stating plainly: a repurposed device with a camera and microphones is still a device with a camera and microphones, now running community software. That’s a reason to prefer open code you can read, not a reason to avoid the idea.
The larger argument is simple. Manufacturers abandon product lines constantly, and every abandonment creates a supply of good hardware with no software. Making that hardware programmable again is one of the more useful things the maker community does, and it turns an e-waste problem into a parts bin for people who build things.