Ooh, now here’s an interesting story, from the pages of The Register. At the recent Multicore Expo, Nokia’s Kari Pulli revealed that the Finnish manufacturer is working on a prototype phone that can instantly recognise real world objects, places and people, just by you pointing your phone’s camera at them.
Oh, and then it overlays information about them on top of the image on the phone’s screen, kind of like virtual signposts.
Essentially, your phone will become sort of a magic lens. You just hold it up to look at whatever it is you’re looking at, it’ll recognise the building or whatever, and instantly show info up on screen to tell you about it, or why people like the place so much, or how much it sells coffee for, or pretty much any information that might be of use.
That’s rather clever, that is…
There’s no word on when this Nokia future phone will go into production, but Pulli stated that us users should start to see the technology becoming commonplace within the next five years. Although, to be fair, it does already exist, with an app available on Google Android phones like the HTC Magic, called Wikitude AR Travel Guide. It, like the pic I knocked together for this story, superimposes 2D info panes on top of the image the camera’s seeing.
However, imagine 3D objects appearing over the real world, and it gets suddenly more interesting. To see how interesting, check out this video of a game called AR Tower Defence in action:
The game works by superimposing 3D on the space below, and it recognises what camera angle to view the 3D objects from by looking at the markers on the desk. Now imagine the ‘space markers’ being actual real world landmarks, and the 3D graphics are scaled up to the level of signposts, or giant alien warriors walking down the street at you. Now that would make an awesome game, a first person shooter with villains you can only see through the camera on your, for example (because it’s got a good camera, so the backgrounds in game would look good) Sony Ericsson Idou.
Of course, there are two drawbacks to that gaming idea: 1/ you’d be having nightmares for weeks, that there really were invisible monsters you could only see with your phone, and 2/ you’d probably get locked up for running down the high street, waving your phone about, and shouting “Die Undead Scum!”
Hmmm, there’s probably still a bit of R&D to do…
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April 1st, 2009 at 5:57 pm
[...] couple of weeks ago, I ran a story about Nokia’s desire to augment physical reality with virtual info on a mobile phone. Well, it seems that idea is starting to come to fruition, with [...]