The increasing popularity of 2d barcode readers for camera phones is driving a set of content based services which enable mobile customer to retrieve relavant mobile multimedia content by scanning barcodes: the digital camera is used to acquire the barcode while a software (local or remote) decodes the barcode and retrieve the URL or the content associated.

In Spain, France and Italy, barcodes are being printed on newspapers and magazines in order to access multimedia content related to a story or article. Tourism is another promising application fields: a barcode printed near a monument or a picture can enable tourists to get information about those objects.

In a few words, we can access information by decoding a small piece of our reality (a document or a statue).

Smarpthones like Apple iPhone and HTC G1 Android, which feature GPS and hi-speed connection, are the perfect platforms to develop, deliver and enable an advanced and innovative approach to the process of getting information from the world around us without a desktop computer and a web browser.

A very interesting article published on Wired explains how a smartphone equipped with GPS and compass can turn to a sort of magnifying glass to see a lot of details which our eyes can’t get at first sight.

In particular,the article describes Last Minute Labs’ nru (‘near you’) application for HTC G1:

When you launch the app, the G1 phone finds its coordinates in space and then brings up a black-and-magenta screen that centers your location inside a compass map. You immediately see a live, Augmented Reality-style map that suggests a short, hidden radius to the circumference representing the nearest places of interest (from Wired.com).

Additionaly, the story explains the benefits of a nice application called Wikitude AR which is

a mobile travel guide with augmented reality functionality based on Wikipedia and Panoramio. You may search landmarks in your surroundings and view them on a map, list, and on an augmented reality (AR) camera view. You’ll see an annotated landscape, mountain names, landmark descriptions and interesting stories (from Mobilizy.com).

The two following videos explain how the application works on Androind mobile phones.