It sounds like something straight out of a futuristic film: House hunters, driving past a for-sale sign, stop and point their cell phone at the sign. With a click, their cell phone screen displays the asking price, the number of bedrooms and baths and other details about the house.
Cell phones are 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, cell phones 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.
In Japan, McDonald's customers can already point their cell phones at the wrapping on their hamburgers and get nutrition information on their screens. Users can also point their phones at billboards to receive movie trailers and at magazine ads to receive insurance quotes, and they can board airplanes using their phones rather than paper tickets.
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Advertisers say they are interested in offering similar capabilities in the United States, but cell phones here do not come with the necessary software. For now, consumers must 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 in the United States.
The most promising way to link cell phones 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 older bar codes. Cameras on cell phones scan the codes, and then the codes are translated into videos, music or text on phone screens.
These codes are already appearing in the United States on some state driver's licenses and mailing labels, mostly for commercial use.
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