Nokia just tip-toed out for a glimpse at innovation with the beta release of its new Point & Find application and service. Simply aim the camera of your Nokia phone at any object in meat-space and the Point & Find application will access relevant data off the Internet. Ok, not
any object as the beta only recognizes movie posters at the moment, but that's the long term plan. Point & Find uses real-time image processing to recognize real-world objects in a Nokia database of virtually tagged items using the phone's camera, Internet connection, and GPS data. The software also recognizes bar codes and supports category-specific text-entry search. The beta software is a free download for Nokia owners in the UK and get this, the US too. Man, Nokia's getting serious about
US market share.
posted Apr 1st 2009 6:46AM
This gets at least three awesome points.
Liking it.
I love to point and shoot my girlfriends "meat-space"
dude that's just wrong...
In before Apple steals the idea.
Hasn't Bill Gate demo something very similar during his last CES keynote? Or the one before?
gtfo of here.
Actually there's an app that does just that on the iPhone! It's called snaptell and it works great, free too... Still a nice feature on nokias part!
Mammoth is right, bill gates showed this tech in as old as the 2007 CES... that's way before the apple app or nokia. even then, i dont think that was the first that was seen of this technology.
Apple's is the only one, as of right now, that has any real potential. Nokia limiting this to their own database automatically kills any real potential for it going anywhere. The Apple app(s) will be able to use any database in the world. Seeing as how the usability of any attempt at this is solely reliant on the database, that's the most important factor.
@utahnkid: nokia wrote on their website that any company can contact them if they want to add some of their content to this application so i don't know why it would need to use multiple databases.
anyway i tried to scan a barcode with this application, but it didn't work. it would be cool if i could find the instructions on how to use it
I wonder if it will found revelant torrents as well.
http://torrentfreak.com/torrent-droid-scan-barcodes-get-torrents-090311
this has huge implications, though it's going to take a while to perfect such a tech. Though looking at how far face recognition technology has come since the mid 1990's, we could be in for something very interesting
NO fool?
Just wonder about the limitation of use,
like QR codes.
But real- analysing is
Cool.
Next time if wouldn't be difficult to point & Find
Mary 008-884-332
"Man, Nokia's getting serious about US market share."
HA! Good one!
(Yes, I am Nokia fanboy)
APRIL FOO-
*beer can opens, house explodes*
Wait a minute...
Woolly Mammoths and the Ice Age happened dozens of millions of years after the dinosaurs went extinct. This poster is filling my head with confusion.
This is a great feature, if it's real. I've been asking for something similar to this for unrelated ideas, but this goes in a direction which could also make what I want possible. I like it, even though I have not considered the longer term privacy and rights issues as it relates to individuals.
These devices are already surveillance capable with audio and video recordings... is that really safe for a society in the long term? That's the question.
april :-)
I got a similar program (SnapTell) off the Android Market a few months ago. It can accurately identify pretty much any DVD, Book, or Video Game cover that you throw at it. It can even get an accurate reading off of an extremely blurry and poorly framed photo.
It's a very cool novelty, but at the end of the day it's pretty useless.
Yeah, SnapTell is available for the iPhone too... the program itself works REALLY well almost works everytime... the problem is (at the moment anyways), I can do a google search and have the results MUCH faster than SnapTell... but it's pretty cool none-the-less!
Presumably this works on any Symbian-60 phone?
And, hence, my N95?
If so, I'm in.
Christ I'm dumb... I should really look more carefully at the pictures before asking stupid questions.
this is freaking stupid:
movie posters are generally at one place - MOVIE THEATERS
additionally if they are for a released movie they almost universally list the movie times at the bottom of the poster.
this is about as dumb as you can get in its current form.
Yeah. Way to read the article.
The beta is limited to movie posters. The full release will recognise all kinds of different things, and then return a plethora of information from the internet. It sounds like Tim Berners-Lee's linked data idea, to me.
Off the top of my head I frequently see movie posters at bus stops, subway and train stations, and in magazines.
Yeah, nobody ever puts movie posters on bus shelters, and billboards, and stores, and restaurants, and bedrooms, and offices, and magazines, and etc...
Only in movie theaters.
Movie posters and barcodes, actually. Right now it's mostly limited to current release movies, but you can (for example) take a picture of a bus poster or a magazine ad and it'll do a pretty good job of recognising it.
They'd better have a wonderful breast analyser to determine which variant of porn people are looking for. "I'm looking for sex, you stupid mobile! Not breast augmentation methods!"
kooaba (www.kooaba.com) does that already for more than year. Besides movie posters you can search DVDs too. Plues it works on the iPhone.
Thanks for pointing that out. I knew there was at least ONE app that has done this for quite a while now. I didn't see what the big deal was and laughed at the ignorant pc fan boy that said 'in before Apple steals it'. Books, bar codes, and more if I recall. Nokia is stealing the idea if anything.
And thus the average man lost what little investigation skills he had.
There have been similar apps for Windows and OS X for years, no innovation points for that.
Why not? If it ends up supporting a large variety of ads as well as other things it could kind of revolutionize the way we look at stuff on the street. You can't really say that just because the technology and the idea has been invented before it automatically makes a mobile implementation less innovative. That would make pretty much everything on a smartphone uninnovative.
I only have one thing to say:
"Have you seen this boy?"
Wow! Now thats innovation for you, check out this scenario, I'm working on the street and i come across this blazing hot chick, i stop and ask her for her digits and details she looks at me sighs and walks away, then i quickly grab my Nokia N97 and take a pic of her ass, the app then scans for a few seconds and returns her facebook profile, her nude pics and her digits. Cool!!
I have to admit, I had the same dream including the crushing rejection scene, earlier this morning. :o
I love the way your mind works. ;) I literally thought the same thing except I kept it decent, pic of face, returns the facebook page with name and profile.
Is it really released for the US too? I'm so proud of you Nokia. *tear*
Im waiting for human recognization. Like it connects to facebook to find the person you took a pic of without permission and then stalk them on the internet. Or at least take the face and have a quick search word of nude.
Meat Space
(giggles)
I know it doesn't work in S60 5th, not even in compatibility mode.
Seems similar to what SnapTell on my iPhone is already capable of, or at least in the same direction.
Ice Age is the new Land Before Time.
This would be a fun feature to use when i get my N97.
i'm callin' april fools on this one...
i'm also using the kooaba.com application
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wysfEM6YgCM&
it's quck, handy and supports more media so why change.
I am not an expert, but this looks like it is infringing on several existing patents held by companies which have been at this for a long time, I first begin using a service just like this in Japan over 5 years ago. I guess, it is just another example of a big corporation taking good ideas from someone else and claiming it as their own.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvWV4W4r4io
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvWV4W4r4io
My colleagues and I were recently introduced to this product through the Point & Find marketing team. We also got to demo it ourselves and I can say that this is far from functional or even useful in its current state. The article mentions that it "..supports category-specific... search," when in reality this is all it supports. The Yahoo directory search engine of yesteryear is the best analogy I can think of. To get information on Starbucks, for example, you would need to switch to the Starbucks directory. Also, since each "directory" is owned by the company that maintains it (i.e. Starbucks in this example), the end user must trust the data provided by that company.
We chose not to pursue a deal with Point & Find for many reasons, but the two main ones were the ridiculous cost to business owners (well over $2,000 USD per month) and the fact that it is just not a viable product. The Symbian app as well as the web-based directory tools are riddled with problems in both usability and functionality. I would like to see this become a useful tool at some point, but they have a lot of things to work out before it's ready for the general public.