SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
link: Chromecast Now Lets Your Guests Take Over Your TV Without Needing Your WiFi Password
Back in June, Google announced a rather nifty new feature coming to Chromecast: your friends and house guests would soon be able to connect to your Chromecast without being on your WiFi network, thanks to the clever use of magic ultrasonic sounds.
after a few months of silence, that feature launches.
One bummer of a caveat, though: it’ll only work if your friend’s phone is running Android, for now. Why? It all comes down to that age-old problem: iOS apps aren’t allowed to do certain things required to make it work, so they’re rolling with it on Android until that changes.
Guest mode is off by default. Flip it on, and your Chromecast will start displaying a PIN on its idle screen. Meanwhile, your TV will start emitting ultrasonic sounds, inaudible to the human ear*, which Chromecast-enabled apps on your phone will be listening for. When the two find each other, everything falls into place and the pairing is made.
[* No word yet on if non-human ears (i.e. dogs) can hear it. If your dog starts whining whenever your Chromecast is on, you should probably turn guest mode back off.]
(Score: 2) by TK on Friday December 19 2014, @02:42PM
The chromecast website is blocked at work, so I can't get more details from the site. Judging by the promo video, I doubt there will be much info there anyway.
There isn't a lot of data transfer from device to device. Really just the url of a video at most (what is that, 1kb?). I imagine that wouldn't be too much of a problem over mobile data. Some latency issues, sure, but supposedly the inconvenience is worth the convenience.
Unless there's a microphone on the chromecast itself, then you could pass data between devices via speaker.
I don't see why this needs to be ultrasonic. Why not play some notes that are distorted to identify the device ID? You can go with some well known old school sound byte [youtube.com] for nostalgia cred. That seems to play well the 20-something crowd.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum