Sync your desktop and phone with a single photo

I don't know about you, but I am forever pulling up Google Maps on screen, sending them to the printer...and then leaving for an assignment without the printouts. To the rescue comes an MIT artificial intelligence expert and a Google engineer who together developed an app that lets you move onscreen data like maps from your computer screen to a phone - and magically open the mapping program in the exact same state on the mobile device.

To use their forthcoming Deep Shot app, you simply point the phone camera at the PC or Mac screen and click the shutter. "The phone automatically opens up the corresponding application in the corresponding state. The same process can also work in reverse, moving data from the phone to a desktop computer," says MIT.
How? MIT's Tsung-Hsiang Chang and Google's Yang Li have written code that runs on both the computer and the phone. It makes visible onscreen the uniform resource identifier (URI), of which the web link, or uniform resource locator (URL), is a mere subset. Unlike an URL, the URI is the gobbledegook you get when you press the "link" button on a Google Maps or Street View page (hover your cursor over this link and look at the bottom corner of your screen to see it). This describes all the map data on the page and crucially also scales the data for the screen window.

Snap the screen and the URI code is recognised by the phone's app, calling up the mapping app program in the very same running state. It's very cool stuff, although not everyone is so impressed. But best of all, when Google decides to release the app, it'll save me a lot of wasted colour printouts.