Tone An experimental Chrome extension for instant sharing over audio

Posted by Alex Kauffmann, Interaction Researcher, and Boris Smus, Software Engineer

Sometimes in the course of exploring new ideas, well stumble upon a technology application that gets us excited. Tone is a perfect example: its a Chrome extension that broadcasts the URL of the current tab to any machine within earshot that also has the extension installed. Tone is an experiment that we’ve enjoyed and found useful, and we think you may as well.

As digital devices have multiplied, so has the complexity of coordinating them and moving stuff between them. Tone grew out of the idea that while digital communication methods like email and chat have made it infinitely easier, cheaper, and faster to share things with people across the globe, theyve actually made it more complicated to share things with the people standing right next to you. Tone aims to make sharing digital things with nearby people as easy as talking to them.

The first version was built in an afternoon for fun (which resulted in numerous rickrolls), but we increasingly found ourselves using it to share documents with everyone in a meeting quickly, to exchange design files back and forth while collaborating on UI design, and to contribute relevant links without interrupting conversations.

Tone provides an easy-to-understand broadcast mechanism that behaves like the human voice—it doesnt pass through walls like radio or require pairing or addressing. The initial prototype used an efficient audio transmission scheme that sounded terrible, so we played it beyond the range of human hearing. However, because many laptop microphones and nearly all video conferencing systems are optimized for voice, it improved reliability considerably to also include a minimal DTMF-based audible codec. The combination is reliable for short distances in the majority of audio environments even at low volumes, and it even works over Hangouts.

Because its audio based, Tone behaves like speech in interesting ways. The orientation of laptops relative to each other, the acoustic characteristics of the space, the particular speaker volume and mic sensitivity, and even where youre standing will all affect Tones reliability. Not every nearby machine will always receive every broadcast, just like not everyone will always hear every word someone says. But resending is painless and debugging generally just requires raising the volume. Many groups at Google have found that the tradeoffs between ease and reliability worthwhile—it is our hope that small teams, students in classrooms, and families with multiple computers will too.

To get started, first install the Tone extension for Chrome. Then simply open a tab with the URL you want to share, make sure your volume is on, and press the Tone button. Your machine will then emit a short sequence of beeps. Nearby machines receive a clickable notification that will open the same tab. Getting everyone on the same page has never been so easy!

Read More..

Projecting without a projector sharing your smartphone content onto an arbitrary display

Posted by Yang Li, Research Scientist, Google Research

Previously, we presented Deep Shot, a system that allows a user to “capture” an application (such as Google Maps) running on a remote computer monitor via a smartphone camera and bring the application on the go. Today, we’d like to discuss how we support the opposite process, i.e., transferring mobile content to a remote display, again using the smartphone camera.

Although the computing power of today’s mobile devices grows at an accelerated rate, the form factor of these devices remains small, which constrains both the input and output bandwidth for mobile interaction. To address this issue, we investigated how to enable users to leverage nearby IO resources to operate their mobile devices. As part of the effort, we developed Open Project, an end-to-end framework that allows a user to “project” a native mobile application onto an arbitrary display using a smartphone camera, leveraging interaction spaces and input modality of the display. The display can range from a PC or laptop monitor, to a home Internet TV and to a public wall-sized display. Via an intuitive, projection-based metaphor, a user can easily share a mobile application by projecting it onto a target display.

Open Project is an open, scalable, web-based framework for enabling mobile sharing and collaboration. It can turn any computer display projectable instantaneously and without deployment. Developers can add support for Open Project in native mobile apps by simply linking a library, requiring no additional hardware or sensors. Our user participants responded highly positively to Open Project-enabled applications for mobile sharing and collaboration.

Read More..

Information sharing for more efficient network utilization and management

Andreas Terzis, Software Engineer

As Internet traffic has grown and changed, Google and other content and application providers have worked cooperatively with Internet service providers (ISPs) so that services can be delivered quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively. For example, rather than content having to traverse a long distance and many different networks to reach an Internet access provider’s network, a content provider might store (cache) the data close by and interconnect (‘peer’) directly with the access provider. Google has invested billions of dollars in the network and infrastructure necessary to bring our services as close to your Internet access provider’s front door as possible, for free – which both reduces ISPs’ costs and improves the user experience.

Content and application providers can also tune their services for congested and/or lower bandwidth environments. For instance, YouTube detects how smoothly a video is playing and adjusts the quality to account for temporary fluctuations in bandwidth or congestion. In the Google Video Quality Report, we transparently reveal the speeds YouTube is experiencing on different networks.

As more of Internet traffic becomes encrypted, some network operators have expressed concern about the effect encryption might have on their ability to manage their networks. We don’t think there has to be a trade-off here – there are ways to do effective network management of encrypted traffic today, and, through further cooperation between content and application providers and ISPs, we believe this could be made easier while still respecting encryption.

To spur discussion and collaboration on this front, we recently submitted a paper to a workshop organized by the Internet Architecture Board outlining some ideas. We advocate for a model where ISPs selectively share network state to content and applications providers, enabling them to adapt to available network resources.

For example, we recently proposed to the Internet Engineering Task Force the concept of Throughput Guidance (TG), whereby mobile network operators could share information about the throughput of a radio downlink. Preliminary field tests in a production LTE network showed that TG reduces YouTube join latency, defined as the amount of time until the video starts playing, by 8% on average, re­buffering time by 20% on average, and rebuffer count by 2% on average. In addition to improving quality of experience for users, this mechanism improves the utilization of providers’ networks. Encryption of traffic would have no impact on the efficacy of this approach; it works equally well with encrypted and unencrypted traffic.

Throughput Guidance is one possible solution and many questions remain unanswered. It’s still relatively early days in our exploration of this and the other measures in our short paper, and we’re looking forward to getting feedback and collaborating with network operators and others.

Read More..