David Emery OnlineLiving in the future
27 September 2007
Mmmm, I love it when a plan comes together.
Back in October of last year I wrote about some of the possibilities enabled by having phones with GPS and cameras and utilising them to enable location and context specific information.
This week I came across a post on the Adaptive Path Blog on Nokia’s Point and Find which, while not being quite the same thing, is pretty darn close – just look at the picture they’ve got and compare it to the illustration that went with my original post!
After doing a bit more Google-digging, I found a little more information about it. It seems to revolve around using the high quality camera in most phones for “visual pattern recognition”, so instead of using high-power (and often inaccurate) GPS to figure out where you are and what you’re pointing at it simply looks at what you’re pointing your camera at, figures out what it is and then displays related information about it.
This method I can see having both its upsides and downsides. The removal of GPS from the equation is most definitely a good one, as it’s not a technology that is really mature enough to include in phones at the moment – it either costs too much, or – as in the Nokia N95 – doesn’t work well. The reliance on identifying objects in images though surely relies on having a large database of objects to identify – you can’t identify something if you don’t know what it is. This obviously limits its usefulness somewhat, although I can see that it could come into it’s own in the retail sector, where manufacturers would want to ensure that their product was in the system.
It still staggers me, on a daily basis, how we really are living in the future; video iChat, the iPhone, electric cars, being under 2hrs away from Paris when in London – it really is quite amazing when you think about it. The advances in mobile technology are one of the most amazing, I think, and it seems like almost everything you can think of is on the verge of actually happening…