I have been thinking about the feasibility of a project that I'd like to develop and I don't know if it is possible. What I want to take a standard linux computer and have it act like a USB monitor when another machine plugs into it via USB; ie. if I plug my laptop into it with a standard USB cable, my laptop OS will detect it as an external monitor and I can then mirror my screen to it. Step two would then be to capture the output from the USB and redirect it out of the linux machines VGA/DVI/HDMI display ports as if it is it's own display. The first step seems harder than the second, but I'm pretty new to Linux driver development.
My questions are:
1) Do you think this is even possible?
2) Do you know of any projects that do something similar?
Not possible, for a very simple reason: You can't plug two USB hosts (e.g, computers) directly into one another. While there are unfortunately some USB cables available with two A ends, trying to use one to connect two computers will at best have no effect, and may in fact cause damage to one or both hosts.