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PhoneCams Will Enhance Ordinary Vision

Posted On: 29 November 2005 By: Jay Oatway Filed Under: Escape From Earth | Future-Stuff-That-Goes-Ping | Info-slavery | Moblogged | No Strings

Today’s phonecam produces blurry crap when it comes to pictures and videos, but this is just the beginning of what will eventually be a replacement for your eyes.

You see, electronic eyes, like those built into your phone, can detect things you can’t. It’s not just about pictures, but about reading data. PhoneCams can scan a barcode, and return not just a series of lines and numbers, but an array of product data, including competitor cost comparison, the ethics of the company that makes the product and even a discount coupons for loyal customers.

They can even help you win tickets to the FIFA World Cup, according to Wired News:

The German branch of Coca-Cola is promoting its CokeFridge portal by encouraging readers of teen magazines Yam!, Starflash and Maedchen, to take pictures of a special logo with their camera phones.

After e-mailing the picture to the Coke portal, a mobile game and the CokeFridge java application is dispatched to the sender’s phone.

The CokeFridge promotion offers chances to win tickets to the FIFA World Cup, as well as download music, ringtones and games.

The applications are numerous for using electronic eyes to connect the physical with the virtual. It’s set to explode through the deployment of semacodes, qrcodes, ColorCodes and various other barcodes of the future.

We could be seeing a lot of this barcode scanning thanks to companies like ScanBuy [via SmartMobs], which is aggressively taking the technology to market:

This technology allows immediate processing of this decoded information for use in limitless mobile commerce applications: streaming music, view trailers, download ringtones, access information. Camera phones become personal, wireless, and interactive barcode scanners.

There is even the beginnings of non-commercial applications, like Semapedia:

Combining the physical annotation technology of Semacode with the availability of high quality information using the free encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Imagine your cellphone as your smart travelguide.

The future is looking out for you.

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