Google’s Deep Shot: Take A Picture, Take It With You

Google has patented a remarkable new technology that has the potential to change the way our various electronic devices interact with each other. Deep Shot is a project currently in the works at Googl...
Google’s Deep Shot: Take A Picture, Take It With You
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  • Google has patented a remarkable new technology that has the potential to change the way our various electronic devices interact with each other. Deep Shot is a project currently in the works at Google Research and centers around the use of a smartphone camera to transfer what you’re doing from your computer to your phone and from your phone to one of several other kinds of devices: laptop, desktop, or tablet.

    According to Patent Bolt, Google filed an application for this patent in October of last year, and the project is currently being developed at Google Research by, among others, Yang Li, one of the technology’s inventors.

    If you own more than one device, you probably know what a pain it can be to take what you’re doing on, say, your computer and get it onto your smartphone so that you can keep reading, watching, browsing, or whatever. Deep Shot is meant to radically simplify that process. With Deep Shot you use your smartphone’s camera to take a picture of your computer screen. Deep Shot captures not only the image itself, but also the work state of the application, effectively importing whatever you’re doing to your phone. For example, if you look up an address on Google Maps on your desktop computer, you can take a picture of the map using Deep Shot. Deep Shot takes the image and turns it into a fully interactive map, effectively reproducing on your phone the map you were looking at on your computer. It also works in reverse. You can use Deep Shot to transfer what you’re doing on your phone back to your computer.

    Check out the video below to see Deep Shot in action.

    This isn’t the first time Google has attacked the problem of migrating tasks between devices. In 2010 they launched the Chrome to Phone browser extension. Chrome to Phone allows users to send content from their Chrome desktop browser to their Android smartphone. In a similar vein, the beta version of Chrome for Android, released early last month, has a browser sync feature that allows users to sync bookmarks, autocomplete suggestions, settings, and open tabs between the desktop version of Chrome and the Android version.

    Google applied for the Deep Shot patent in the third quarter of 2011. The technology is apparently still only in the experimental phase right now, so there is no word on when we might see Deep Shot in a publicly-available format.

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