An app connects devices to your printer through its camera
A team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and two other schools created Snap-To-It, an Android app that hopes to make connecting your smartphone to other smart devices as easy as snapping a photo.
A video from the researchers demonstrates the app in action: a forgetful professor (or grad student) forgets his printouts. He finds the printer, photographs it with the app, and presses print directly on screen. No fussy software downloads or confusing cables.
The app broadcasts the photo of the device to all nearby devices on the network. A computer-vision algorithm compares the photo to stored images to determine which machine you'r trying to connect to. The app will also use data about where you're standing and the direction your phone is pointing to try to identify the correct device; if it isn't sure, it will present a list of its top five guesses.
In test trials, without discounting low-quality photos (blurry images or ones snapped from odd angles), the app connected users to the correct device 82 percent of the time. The app requires setting up the system in advance by taking reference photos of the Internet-connected devices, and setting up which functions the app user can use.
"The ability to walk into a space that I haven't been into before and just start using equipment that I'm authorized to is really nice," Anind Dey, associate professor at Carnegie Mellon and a coauthor of the research paper, told Technology Review.
A paper on the project will be presented at a human-computer interaction conference in California this spring. Snap-To-It is part of a larger research project on the Internet of Things at Carnegie Mellon, which has received $500,000 in funding from Google to help launch its projects.
Not only can Snap-To-It relieve academics and office workers from tech set-up headaches, but it can also lead to promising future developments, like the ability to get more information about a new device, or even controlling multiple devices at once.
Snap-To-It
