Sharing (Content, Apps) Among Devices

Despite having wireless connectivity, the Cloud, Facebook, Google+, Dropbox and the entire galaxy of services that enable electronic sharing among people and devices, the user experience (believe it, or not) is still in its infancy. Just recall how "easy" it is to send a photo to a group of friends: take a snapshot with your camera, remove the memory card (or connect the camera to a computer using an USB cable), download it to a local hard drive, learn how to use a cloud service to upload the photo, get the url link to the uploaded copy and paste it to your email application, praying it will become "hot" when you click "send". Then on the other device click "check for new messages", and open the link (if it is not hot, select it - not an easy task on a mouseless device - and paste into the address field of the web browser.

Now imagine the possible alternative: you hold your camera, it is aware of the other displays in the neighborhood, you touch the photo being previewed and swipe it towards the other device. The process is shown starting exactly at 2:00 minutes on this video by TAT.

Back in 2007, at the Microsoft Imagine Cup student competition, I saw a system similar in concept. Called Oneworld, it allowed application sharing among devices by means of pushing and pulling open application windows to computers in the "neighborhood", where the neighborhood was defined in the virtual context (my left neighbor could have been anywhere in the world). So essentially I was (for instance) typing something in my Microsoft Word application and I could drag the open Word window to the right edge of my screen and it would start emerging on the left edge of the other machine's screen. Then the person operating the other machine would "pull" the window (this is a nice implementation of security protocol) to her screen. And after having a look at it, or after making some corrections the Word window would be handed back to me, I could continue typing and save the document.

Implemented at the operating system level such sharing mechanism could immediately enable all the existing applications available today. It is still a mystery to me why Microsoft did not take this idea and prototype developed by the inPUT team back in 2007 and did not make it a feature of Vista or the Windows 7.

Probably they are waiting for Apple to do this. Apple has just patented a similar sharing method, throwing pico projectors to the mix. So it is very likely one day Steve Jobs will be showcasing this as unique, magical and revolutionary. When he does this, just remember, the idea was first developed in Poland :). It is likely the history will repeat itself - after all the flash based, touch operated Business Memo by Univex developed in 1995 inspired the original iPod.