Deep Shot - Take SnapShot To Transfer Data

Many times, you search for a particular gadget on your PC, try to memorize the model number or features, and then go to the supermarket. But one out of three times you forget it, open your smartphone and again type the same web address to view the same old page. Wouldn’t it be simpler to just copy this tiny bit of data to your iPhone or tablet? You will argue that you’ll have to connect your device to your computer and may even have to open the iTunes link to synchronize the two gadgets before you can transfer the data. Yes, it is a long process and it will definitely easier to open up the web page again on your phone. But if there is a way to directly transfer the data without such interfacing barriers, which way you will prefer? Well, a graduate at the MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Tsung-Hsiang Chang has created just the right technology for this in collaboration with Google’s Yang Li. The new innovative method, called Deep Shot is a relatively simpler and faster data transfer process between computers and phones or vice versa. All you have to do is to take a snapshot of your PC or laptop screen with the smartphone camera. The algorithm for the software identifies the app or webpage and opens the same on your phone in the corresponding state.
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Most of the web apps use the URI (Uniform resource identifier) to tell the state they are in. This particular feature is exploited by the Deep Shot technology. For example, when you are surfing for an address on Google Maps and click on the link that says “Link”, a new pop up opens that says, “Paste link in email or IM”. The link is a painfully long string of alphanumeric symbols, along with the addresses of the starting and ending points plus codes that reveal their geographical coordinates and the estimated dimensions of the map window. Now this is a URI. The information conveyed by a URI varies drastically.
Deep Shot is a very useful application in case you want to transfer maps and other such small chunks of data. It requires very little memory for installing the software on the phone and al the computers with which you are planning to use the phone for Deep Shot. When you are transferring the data from the computer to your cell phone, Deep Shot utilizes the computer’s vision algorithm to identify the app, after which its own software extracts the URI. The reverse process happens when a computer is downloading an app from a phone.
The system was developed by Chang and Li last summer when Chang had gone for a summer internship at Google Inc. They presented a research paper on it in Association for Computing Machinery’s CHI conference on computer-human interaction in May. The software works with many websites using URIs like Google Maps, Yelp and could be introduced with other websites with a little bit coding changes. The software is yet to see a commercial launch but once it does, Google will file for a patent because Chang developed it at their Labs during his internship. All web users who love cloud computing must love this novel technique because it is bound to save a lot of time and also prevent that déjà vu feeling while retyping the web address.
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