Cameras as input devices: "As I’ve written in the past, one of the wonderful aspects of mobile devices is the availability of alternate input devices such as voice and camera. A recent News.com article on camera phone search technology describes several companies using the camera as web input."

Of course, all the noise recently has been around barcodes (in their 2D and 3D variety), but that's not all that can be done here. We're putting out a proposal in this area at the moment with some lovely ideas in it - you know, the kind that when you hear them you break into a grin because they're so very sweet.

I'll write about it soon.

Comments

[Simon cavill]

Hi Tom,
About mobile phones and barcodes. Spent several years on and off on various on projects and user trials both using the phone as a barcode reader and sending them to the handset as SMS/MMS/via Java applet largely for retail loyalty and mobile ticketing (Dutch Railways, SNCF, BVG Berlin etc) for transport and entry into nightclubs. An awful lot of people have tried this and given up, those that do poke their head over the parapet get various threats regarding potential patent infringements. If your interested I can point you to people who I think might have the right ideas based on a lot of trails and user testing. It largely comes back to the same old problem of consistency across handsets....

Best regards,

Simon