It sounds like something straight out of a futuristic film: House hunters, driving past a for-sale sign, stop and point their cellphone at the sign. With a click, their cellphone screen displays the asking price, the number of bedrooms and baths and lots of other details about the house. A Demonstration
The ability of cellphones to read bar codes is still rudimentary in the United States, but here is a basic demonstration. Instructions »
Media experts say that cellphones, the Swiss Army knives of technology, are quickly heading in this direction. New technology, already in use in parts of Asia but still in development in the United States, allows the phones to connect everyday objects with the Internet.
In their new incarnation, cellphones become a sort of digital remote control, as one CBS executive put it. With a wave, the phone can read encoded information on everyday objects and translate that into videos, pictures or text files on its screen.
“The cellphone is the natural tool to combine the physical world with the digital world,” that executive, Cyriac Roeding, the head of mobile-phone applications for CBS, said the other day.
In Japan, McDonald’s customers can already point their cellphones at the wrapping on their hamburgers and get nutrition information on their screens. Users there can also point their phones at magazine ads to receive insurance quotes, and board airplanes using their phones rather than paper tickets. And film promoters can send their movie trailers from billboards.
Advertisers say they are interested in offering similar capabilities in the United States, but cellphones in the States do not come with the necessary software. For now, consumers have to download the technology themselves.
Still, big advertising and technology companies like Hewlett-Packard and the Publicis Groupe, an advertising conglomerate, are pushing to popularize the technology here.
Until now, in most parts of the world, Web surfing has been separate from everyday activities like riding the train, watching television and driving. But the new technology may erode that distinction.
“You’ve picked up this product, and you don’t want to go back to your PC,” said Tim Kindberg, a senior research at the Bristol, England, lab of Hewlett-Packard. “Or you’re outside this building, and you want more information. We call it the ‘physical hyperlink.’ ”
In much the same way that Web publishing took off because of the ability to link to other people’s sites, cellphone technologies linking everyday objects with the Web would reveal the digitally encoded attributes of tangible things on grocery shelves or newsstands.
“Everything in the physical world has information related to it somewhere electronically, including yourself and the desk you’re sitting in,” said Chas Fritz, chief executive of NeoMedia Technologies, a company developing these cellphone capacities.
The most promising way to link cellphones with physical objects is a new generation of bar codes: square-shaped mosaics of black and white boxes that can hold much more information than traditional bar codes. The cameras on cellphones scan the codes, and then the codes are translated into videos, music or text on the phone screens.
American universities and technology companies have been experimenting with the codes in their labs for several years. Now, as more cellphones come equipped with cameras and the ability to run small computer programs, the codes are beginning to appear on some state drivers’ licenses and on some mailing labels, mostly for commercial use.
There are other technologies being developed for consumers to scan objects, including radio waves, computer chips or satellite location systems, but the bar code technology is the most developed — and simple and cheap enough even for individuals to publish them on printed materials or on Web sites.
But Hewlett-Packard and the Publicis Groupe are meeting for the second time with cellphone companies in May to advocate for the technology. Technology companies like Motorola and Microsoft have also been researching uses for the codes.
In Japan, the codes did not become mainstream until the largest cellphone companies started loading the code readers on all new phones a few years ago. Now, millions of people have the capability built into their phones, and businesses, in turn, are using them all over — on billboards, street signs, published materials and even food packaging.
In the late 1990s, several dozen start-up companies tried to create devices that would scan print content and ads and then reveal extra information to the reader. But consumers balked at using a special device only to interact with publications.
But now the time seems right for cellphones, ubiquitous and increasingly sold with cameras, to be pressed into service as the scanners. |