Using the Phone’s Camera

Last week, I hypothesized that it should be possible to take a picture of business cards with the mobile and have the data added to your contacts in a variety of ways. I was told this does indeed exist, and a quick search found scanR. Unfortunately, when Steven tested it on his N75, it didn't work. He could recognize the text in the picture, but the OCR (optical character recognition) failed. I look forward to further improvements in the area.

A similar - and technically better - solution was reported by NPR this week. This one adds optical technology and recognition software directly to the device; it is targeted at helping the blind navigate their world.

cite="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18504117">"Taking picture ... detecting orientation," a digitized voice from the phone says. "Processing U.S. currency image, please wait ??? $20."

This is on a full-featured Nokia device, and is a further example of Nokia serving various special needs populations. But as we see from the business card reader, it would be trivial to convert the reader to the larger population. If it can process text to be able to read it, then it can process text to save text. A scanner in your pocket.

Once we have this engine in a device, a new array of physical-virtual world integration products become possible.

SonyEricsson UIQ phones, at least P990, has this feature in built. It scans the card on phone, so no network connection is required. Problem with phones is that the camera needs (at least currently) good lightning conditions to work. But I wonder how the blind people can point the camera to where they need information about, since they do not see where to point the camera at… Well, this works perhaps in limited situations, like holding something in your hand you want to “see” — not upside down, of course…

Oh, excellent. I’m hoping that AT&T’s SIM-only plan will encourage SonyEricsson and Nokia to sell their higher end phones in the U.S.

Re P990 we tested it after a conference last year with a whole bunch of different size (fonts) and character styles on different business cards, it managed most of them first time really well, but you do need to be familiar with focussing camera well (I wasn’t but my other half was).
Re blind – I saw an article on iD4 today about Nokia bringing out a phone which can convert photographed text – but it doesn’t say which handset – http://i4donline.net/news/news-details.asp?catid=11&newsid=13380

actually having re-read the link above, I think the link from my article wasthe same thing, sorry

The Motorola Ming also ships with a business card reader function. http://direct.motorola.com/hellomoto/motomingedge/