Physical World, Soon To Be Connected

Adding a scanner to a camera phone, allows the physical world to be connected with the electronic one.

From TechNews World Cell Phones May Soon Add Scanning Technology

Once a phone is outfitted with a camera, the transition to scanner is fairly straightforward. The key is adding optical character recognition features to the phone, which allow small amounts of text to be captured and digitized.

Once a phone is outfitted with a camera, the transition to scanner is fairly straightforward. The key is adding optical character recognition (OCR) features to the phone, which allow small amounts of text to be captured and digitized.

While there are some potentially interesting applications, the technology remains immature for now. One problem is there are several proprietary approaches for reading scanned data. Some approaches scan bar codes, others scan digital watermarks, and still others do visual recognition of existing logos and products.

Those aren't the only problems right now, but one thing is for sure, this application (once implemented) will offer numerous opoprtunities for consumers and corporations.