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A must read recap - The Intel Lab in Cambridge, MA

New York Times / 2005-10-09

Camera phone snapshots connect the dots...

http://semacode.org/about/press/clips/2004-10-09-nyt/

By: Douglas Heingartner - NYT

When you think of a computerized public information kiosk, your mental picture might include greasy touch screens, broken trackballs and frozen monitors.

But researchers at an Intel-financed laboratory at Cambridge University have developed a way to replace displays like those with something portable, not to mention personal: a mobile phone's built-in camera and screen.

They and others plan to use commercially available hardware to turn the camera-equipped mobile phone 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 in Cambridge. On those posters are symbols the researchers call SpotCodes: concentric rings of black and white blocks representing ones and zeros. Focusing a camera phone on the code and then clicking any button starts up a wireless service - for example, buying a train ticket, checking a flight's departure time or downloading 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 hand-held) to bridge the gap between real and virtual. The potential applications are many. The SpotCode team, for example, has a prototype service that simulates an airport experience.

Pointing and clicking on an overhead plasma screen will display flight information; if you wish, details are stored in your phone, activating a text message reminder that is sent just before boarding time.

Part of the team's motivation was to take better advantage of underused public displays. "A lot of the info is static, so there's no point in putting it on a plasma screen," Sharp said.

His team has been investigating ways of using big screens like these to display images too large for a cellphone's tiny screen - for example, a detailed map to a traveler's departure gate - while reserving the phone's display for personalized information.

"So instead of having a little display and keypad, what you've basically got is a big bank of buttons all laid out in front of you on the plasma screen," Sharp said. Unlike touch screens, which require users to stand within arm's length, a camera phone allows a user to control a display from a distance.

Mobile phones have long been able to do more than make calls and take pictures; you can use them to pay parking meters, make purchases from vending machines, project images against a wall, display your bicycling speed or even navigate an unfamiliar city. But the desire to connect the paper and online worlds has only recently become practical, partly because of the rapid rise of camera-equipped cellphones. There are already tens of millions of camera phones in use, according to American Technology Research, an investment analysis firm.

Most of the new systems work on the same basic principle: Software converts a camera phone's built-in lens into a scanner, similar to a bar-code reader's. When the lens is pointed at a recognizable symbol, the phone's display becomes a real-time viewfinder. In the case of SpotCodes, for example, once the lens detects the symbol, red crosshairs appear. Clicking then initiates a particular action, like loading a Web page or transmitting an e-mail address.

The clickable symbols can assume various forms and can appear on almost any surface, including a poster, a printed page, a T-shirt or even a product itself. "It could be a box of Tide or a can of Coke," said Chas Fritz, chairman of NeoMedia Technologies of Fort Myers, Florida, which has been developing such tags for nearly a decade. "That Coke can is now interactive."

Though applications like these are only now appearing in the United States and Europe, they have become increasingly popular in Asia over the past two years. Examples in Japan include pointing your phone at printed maps to find the nearest automated teller machine or training your camera phone on a marketplace's produce to determine its origin and freshness.

Crucial to such projects has been the fact that major mobile operators in Asia like NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone install the scanning software on most phones they distribute. A Vodafone spokesman said no decisions had been made about outfitting European or U.S. phones with similar capabilities.

"When the phone makers start building this software into their phones here, that's when this will really take off," said Anil Malhotra, vice president of Bango, a Cambridge-based company working on ways to commercialize SpotCodes.

Others in this new industry agreed. "Japan is a school case for us, showing that the technology is already working in a country where the technology is more advanced," said Avi Outmezguine, co-founder of New York-based Scanbuy, another company trying to establish a foothold in what he calls "scan commerce."

Scanbuy and others have started a number of applications in North America. NeoMedia markets a business application that lets clean-up workers click with a camera phone on a chemical drum's tag to learn more about what has been spilled.

And coding enthusiasts are using a technology from an Ontario-based company, Semacode, for updates on bus arrivals. Volunteers have been placing the Semacode markers at bus stops in several U.S. cities. When pointed at the code, a camera phone can connect to bus tracking data made available by a company called NextBus.com.

Other initiatives are afoot in Europe. Next month, a project in Finland will let shoppers with special diets point their cellphones at various food bar codes to see if the ingredients pass muster.

Unsurprisingly, many of the proposed applications revolve around shopping, for example letting potential buyers call up information on a DVD player's technical specifications or check how many are in stock.

But how about taking advantage of standardized ISBN codes to lend a physical storefront to a virtual store? "You can walk into Barnes Noble, click on a book using our software, and it'll link you directly to the Amazon price," Fritz of NeoMedia said.

So much pointing and clicking inevitably generates extra traffic for phone operators. But it's still too early to say where any big money might be made and by whom. That explains, in part, why a chip maker like Intel would be involved in this kind of research.

"We're still trying to understand what it's useful for," said Derek McAuley, director of research for the Intel lab in Cambridge. "As technologists, we just generate all these options, and then the business folk figure out what to do with it."

The New York Times