Nokia Point & Find - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Nokia Point & Find is a mobile application, which lets you point your Nokia smartphone camera at objects and images you want to know more about, to find more information. It is a visual search technology that uses the phone's camera to obtain information by using image recognition to identify objects, images and places in the physical world in real-time. For example, one can use the application to find information on movies by pointing the camera at movie posters and then view reviews, or find tickets at nearby theaters. Current uses include city landmark tag

Tag (metadata)

In online computer systems terminology, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information . This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching...

ging, barcode

Barcode

A barcode is an optical machine-readable representation of data, which shows data about the object to which it attaches. Originally barcodes represented data by varying the widths and spacings of parallel lines, and may be referred to as linear or 1 dimensional . Later they evolved into rectangles,...

scanning for comparison shopping and 2D barcode scanning and finding information related to products and services based on content provided by third party publishers. The Point & Find application is limited to a specific set of Nokia

Nokia

Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational communications corporation that is headquartered in Keilaniemi, Espoo, a city neighbouring Finland's capital Helsinki...

smartphone devices.

Technology

Nokia Point & Find makes use of the Mixed Reality

Mixed reality

Mixed reality refers to the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualisations where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real time...

(MR) platform. Mixed Reality is a combination of Augmented Reality

Augmented reality

Augmented reality is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. It is related to a more general concept called mediated reality, in which a view of reality is...

(AR) and Augmented Virtuality as described in the Virtuality Continuum

Virtuality Continuum

thumb|right|400px|Reality-Virtuality Continuum.The Virtuality Continuum is a phrase used to describe a concept that there is a continuous scale ranging between the completely virtual, a Virtuality, and the completely real: Reality. The reality-virtuality continuum therefore encompasses all possible...

. Nokia Point & Find is based on real-time image processing and object recognition

Object recognition

Object recognition in computer vision is the task of finding a given object in an image or video sequence. Humans recognize a multitude of objects in images with little effort, despite the fact that the image of the objects may vary somewhat in different view points, in many different sizes / scale...

technology.

Shopping

By pointing the camera at a barcode, Nokia Point & Find retrieves information about product pricing and availability.

City Guide

When a Nokia Point & Find user points their device at a building they may see tags that were added by other Point & Find users, creating the possibility of real-time mobile discovery. This could be useful for travel and exploration of new cities. It enables the user to tag a building and for any Nokia Point & Find user to retrieve the information at a later date.

Advertising and Branding

Publishers and advertisers are currently able to create and publish their own content, via a content management system provided by Nokia Point & Find. The content published in these third-party “worlds” can be retrieved and accessed by Point & Find users when pointing their camera phone at specific products, images or buildings.

Restrictions

Point & Find is only available for limited Nokia smartphones including the N97, N97 Mini, 5800 XpressMusic, 5530 XpressMusic, 5230 and X6. An Internet connection is required to make use of the application. Nokia charges third-party publishers to create their own Point & Find content.

Hardware Limitations