MIT computer science grad student Tsung-Hsiang Chang interned at Google last summer, teaming up with researcher Yang Li there on tech that makes it quick and easy to transfer what’s displayed on a website on your computer to your phone, and vice versa. An example is the age-old use case of opening directions on your computer and wanting to transfer them on over to your phone instantaneously.
Called Deep Shot, the software (which belongs to Google) works with your smartphone’s camera to take what is displayed on a website and transfer it, in live state, onto your phone — simply by taking a photo of your computer screen. On the flip side, say if you wanted to push an email from your phone to a computer to take advantage of a bigger keyboard, you can similarly push data from the phone to that computer.
“People are used to using heavy tools to transfer data or synchronize two devices,” MIT’s Tsung-Hsiang Chang explained. “You have to plug in a USB cable and maybe open iTunes and synchronize a bunch of data at the same time. But sometimes you just want to send a tiny bit of information, or a single piece of information.”
Check out the video below to see the tech in action:
The technology is based on a Universal Resource Identifier (URI), which allows websites and web apps to describe what state they are in and what data they are presenting. Right now Deep Shot works with just Google Maps and Yelp, but the URI standards means it has the potential to be extended to other web apps fairly easily.
In an article on MIT’s news site yesterday, an IBM researcher commented on some of the challenges involved in taking the technology to the next level. Mainly, he notes that it would require device manufacturers to agree on broad interoperability standards – a not so easy task.
“I find it a really compelling use case, so I would really hope that companies like Microsoft would really consider adding it,” says Jeffrey Nichols, a researcher at IBM’s Almaden research center who specializes in mobile devices. “I see it being much more likely to happen with websites than with desktop applications. On the other hand, to some extent, we’re moving away from desktop applications and moving more and more to the Web, so it’s not clear to me how important it is that we really bring all the native application developers into the fold.”
You can read the full article on MIT’s website, which also links to a research paper authored by the duo and presented in May at the Association for Computing Machinery’s CHI conference.
