When Is A Camera Phone A Web Browser?

Soon your camera phone will be used as a browser by recognizing images as hyperlinks.

Images, like a logo or a barcode (anythign in a database) will act as hyperlinks to websites. the optical recognition ability of the camera on your mobile phone will be your browser that navigates for you.

A couple of the physical world connection players (Mobot, ScanBuy and Neven Vision) are highlighted in this story and a couple new players to check out too. (sub req'd).

Camera phone shots used for web searches

So Mobot and Neven Vision of Santa Monica, California, are using object-recognition software. Advertisers pay to enter products, logos, movie posters or magazine ads into a database. When people photograph them and send the image to Mobot or Neven as a picture message, they receive information such as a web address or text message in return.

Phones will soon be able to recognise text within photographs, too. The company 23half in Mountain View, California, has released a prototype system called nThrum, which translates the image of text into actual text, and then feeds it into a search engine.

Buy products by taking photos of them, using 3D object-recognition software provided by Evolution Robotics in Pasadena, California.

Adding context information, such as the location at which the photograph was taken, would improve the search further (GPS IP will be key)

If your phone had image-recognition software, you could take a picture of the place and use it to instantly pull up a list of reviews. And you could do the same for monuments and tourist attractions, CDs, logos, billboard advertisements, almost anything you want information on.

Using an image is a convenient way to bring up information, especially as phone keypads are not really designed for typing. Your camera will be your mouse.

See how valuable physical world hyperlinks will be?