Overview

Point&Connect (P&C) seeks an intuitive and resilient device pairing solution on standard mobile phones. Its operation follows the simple sequence of point-and-connect: when a user plans to pair her mobile phone with another device nearby, she simply points her phone towards the intended target, and it is done for pairing.

P&C aims to provide an intention-based and intuitive device pairing, which can reduce user efforts. The main technical challenge is to come up with a simple system technique to effectively capture and understand the user intention, and pick the right device among many others nearby. It should further work on any mobile phones or small devices without relying on infrastructure or special hardware. P&C meets this challenge with a novel collaborative scheme to measure maximum distance change based on acoustic signals. Using only a speaker and a microphone, P&C can be implemented solely in user-level software and work on COTS phones. With P&C, we have built an example application Point&Share (also called "Throw-to-Share") for file sharing between mobile phones and demonstrated that it is a cool and effective way to do device pairing, which can faciliate spontaneous wireless communication applications, such as fil swaping, music sharing, and collaborative gaming, etc.

Demo

We build an example application Point&Share (also called "Throw-to-Share") for file sharing services between mobile phones. When the users launch such an application and locate the file to be shared, the user who has the file simply points her phone to the target to complete file sharing.

The demo won the best demo award in Mobisys'08.

Download

Currently,Point&Connect supports Windows Mobile 5.0+ phones.

Software will be released soon.

If you have interest, please contact us.