... no no, not like Davros, evil Dalek scientist himself: Researchers at Accenture Technology Labs in France have recently unveiled a project called "Pocket Supercomputer" that processes video from a 3G mobile phone and gives you an instant data feed about what it sees. More after the jump......
Effectively being an information-rich heads-up-display for your life, it could look at a plate of foreign food, work out what ingredients there may be and alert you if you're allergic to any... find a review of a book you see in a bookstore, or tell you where you can see the movie on a poster you've walked by.
As the video shows, the idea is to just make a call from an ordinary 3G phone and a remote computer does all the clever object recognition bits (using a 'scale-invariant feature transform algorithm' to hunt through a - presumably enormous - database).
The potential uses of this technology are mind-boggling... if combined with, say, the Google Streetview database, you could just hold up your phone and learn where you are, how good the restaurant nearby is and what the weather prediction for the town is for the rest of the day. It could be invaluable for partially-sighted people, tourists in a new location ... and, if hooked up to a robot, those hell-bent on global domination...
Imagination combines it with a 3G iPhone 2.0 with its internet capability, essentially making something that'd make the HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy look a bit naff (to mix sci-fi references for a moment).
It sounds amazing, and looks like it's technically feasible right now, or at least in the very near future. Getting the consumer used to having such a data-rich life may be tricky ... but at least it looks like a good use for the video calling functions of 3G phones which so many users tend to ignore.
(Accenture lab, via New Scientist)
UPDATE FOR ADDY/JESUS: I liked this article... it's both gadgety and science, and though it's pretty amazing stuff it seems to have generally slipped under the radar online.
No comments:
Post a Comment