A new Chrome extension can instantly share URLs among nearby devices, using sound to broadcast the information to microphones.

Google Tone is an experimental feature that could be used to easily share browser pages, search results, videos and other pages among devices in an office, classroom or family setting, according to Google Research.

While it can’t pass through walls or travel beyond earshot, the system is designed to make sharing browser URLs as easy as talking to people nearby.

“The initial prototype used an efficient audio transmission scheme that sounded terrible, so we played it beyond the range of human hearing,” researcher Alex Kauffmann and software engineer Boris Smus wrote in a post on the Google Research blog.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

…