This is simply awesome. Tsung-Hsiang Chang who is a graduate student at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab along with Yang Li who is a Google employee have developed an application that lets users transfers the state of an application from a computer to a smartphone and back by simply snapping a picture of the computer’s screen. The picture once taken, the application continues on the other device right where it left off!
The application is called Deep Shot and was designed to work with Web apps. They explain that this works because Web apps can describe the state they’re in with a combination of symbols which are called the unique resource identifier (URI). Deep Shot can use this to seamlessly transfer the working state of an app without having to interact with any third party app. You don’t even have to touch the keyboard or mouse to make this work! Just snap a pic!
With Deep Shot’s software installed on a computer and phone. users can take a picture with the phone of an open application on the computer. The phone’s software will then use digital vision algorithms to figure out what application is in the picture and open it. The computer transmits the corresponding URI to the phone using a WiFi connection.
Google however holds the rights for this app as it was developed by Google.
Check out the video.