MousePath: Enhancing PC Web Pages through Smartphone and Optical Mouse

This paper proposes MousePath, a novel lightweight communication system between PC web pages and smartphones. MousePath works by putting the optical mouse on top of the smartphone's screen, then its transmission starts and is instantly finished without association and pairing friction. It encodes data into the movement of smartphone's display content and leverages the optical mouse of the computer to sense the movement for decoding the data. We prototype and evaluate the system with commercial computers and smartphones. A key benefit of MousePath is that it can be seamlessly integrated into web pages. Two representative web applications, i.e., sensor sharing and message sharing, have been developed to demonstrate MousePath's potential in enhancing PC web page functionalities.