WHEN you think of a public information kiosk, your mental picture might include greasy touch screens, broken trackballs and frozen monitors.
SOURCE NYTIMES
Connecting Paper and Online Worlds by Cellphone Camera
IN A SNAP Cellphone cameras can gather information in public settings for personal use. Focusing on symbols called SpotCodes can launch a wireless service that can, for example, check a flight's departure time.
By DOUGLAS HEINGARTNER
Published: October 7, 2004
CAMBRIDGE, England
WHEN you think of a public information kiosk, your mental picture might include greasy touch screens, broken trackballs and frozen monitors.
But researchers at an Intel-financed lab at Cambridge University have developed a way to replace displays like those with something portable, not to mention personal: a cellphone's built-in camera and screen. They and others plan to use commercially available hardware to turn the camera-equipped cellphone into a mouse, remote control, keyboard and more.
"Instead of having all the hassle of putting things out in the environment that you have to maintain and that people can vandalize, you get a cheap PC, shove it in the back room of your shop and just put posters out front," said Richard Sharp, an Intel researcher here.
On these posters are symbols the researchers call SpotCodes: concentric rings of black-and-white blocks representing ones and zeros. Focusing your camera phone on the code and then clicking any button launches a wireless service - for example, the ability to buy a train ticket, check an airplane's departure time or download a ring tone from a store display.
The codes can be produced on any inkjet printer and can be read even by phones with low-resolution cameras.
SpotCode is not alone in this new field. Many other companies are introducing tools and formats that use the camera phone (and camera-equipped palmtop) to bridge the gap between real and virtual.
The potential applications are many. The SpotCode team, for example, has a prototype...
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