Towards a cross platform solution to share small-scale data across smart devices using visible light: a prototype developed in android environment

Abstract

There is a significant growth of cloud based applications in the Smartphone app-markets which leads to the necessity of finding a way where two Smartphone can easily exchange short streams of data. These small scale data usually act as a “key” to the original content that the users wish to share. Possible use cases could be – identity information exchange, file sharing links, etc. The main challenge with the existing communication protocols e.g. Bluetooth, NFC is that they do not work cross-platform, for example Android-to-IOS or vice versa. This project explores the possibility of using the integrated Smartphone sensors (e.g. ambient light sensor) for these kinds of short scale data exchange. The successful completion of this project would have a deliverable of a Smartphone app which can share the “links” to particular contents stored in the application server, using the Smartphone sensors.