If you’ve ever used a Mac running OS X Lion, then there’s a good chance you’ve played with AirDrop. The drag-and-drop feature allows users to share content between computers on a common Wi-Fi network with understated ease.
It’s such a cool feature, in fact, that a lot of folks have wondered when Apple is going to bring it to iOS. Just imagine dragging and dropping files to your iPhone or iPad — it’d be awesome. Especially if it looked anything like this…
This amazing concept comes from Ishac Bertran, an industrial engineer and all-around thinker. The idea was born out of frustration one day when Bertran found himself in a common predicament, trying to share content from his computer to a mobile device.
Sure there are services like Pocket, iCloud, and Dropbox that aim to help keep our devices connected, but it all still feels so overly complicated. Enter Bertran’s idea, which he calls “Natural interactions with spatially aware devices.”
Bertran explains that computers and mobile devices could use Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to detect each other, thus allowing them to enter the ‘drag and drop’ sharing mode. The drag and drop gesture, however, would just be user-facing, and the actual transfer of data would be handled by a cloud service in the background. Interesting.
The whole process screams Apple, as it takes a normally tedious process (plug in chord, run iTunes, etc.) and makes it much more natural. It essentially makes the technology get out of the way — a line often used to describe iOS devices.
We don’t foresee Apple bringing anything like this to its mobile platform in the near future. But, as with other awesome concepts we’ve seen, our fingers are crossed that it’s taking notes.
What do you think of Bertran’s idea?