Fruity
toymaker Apple has patented 33 new things at the US Patent and Trademark
Office. Amongst the patents is the usually dull stuff including flexible
cabling, scrolling lyrics but it seems that Jobs' Mob has been working
on doing things with the iPhone and the iPod touch's camera.
One focuses
on object identification and the other on face recognition. The
object-identification
filing describes a system in which a handheld's camera captures an image of an
object either in visual light or infrared, then compares that image with
information stored over a network. The network then asks the you what
information about that object you'd like to download, then provides
it.
According to the patent. You could simply point your iPhone at a work of
art and quickly be presented with info about it. It will also try to
flog you T-shirts featuring that work in the museum store. By using the
iPhone's GPS and digital compass could also enable the system to provide
location-based things like restaurants and tourist attractions.
The
face-recognition
filing describes two different systems. One looks for a face and another
matches what it sees with a database of whom it knows. Of course this
will only work if Apple can get is toy's battery to last longer than five
minutes.