MousePath: Lightweight phone-to-web information sharing via mouse interface

Abstract

This paper proposes MousePath, a novel lightweight communication system between PC web pages and smartphones. MousePath works in two modalities, MousePath-OPT and MousePath-BL. MousePath-OPT works by putting the optical mouse on top of the smartphone’s screen, then its transmission starts and instantly finishes without association and pairing fraction. It encodes data into the movement of the smartphone’s display content and leverages the optical mouse of the computer to sense the movement for decoding the data. MousePath-BL works by emulating the smartphone as a Bluetooth wireless mouse. Then the smartphone can directly transmit information to the web page via generating mouse events. We prototype and evaluate the system with commercial computers and smartphones. A key benefit of MousePath is that it seamlessly bridges smartphones to co-located PC web applications. MousePath-OPT is more secure and convenient to use while MousePath-BL achieves higher throughput. Two representative web applications, i.e., sensor sharing and message sharing, are developed to demonstrate MousePath’s potential in enhancing PC web applications.