OCR for Digital Phones

via BoingBoing:

"NEC has developed software that lets you wave your cameraphone at a page of text for 3-5 seconds and produce a scan that includes optical-character-recognition-extracted text as well as any images and a graphic of the page itself. "

link

If it works, this is indeed very cool.

A while back I was thinking that it would be pretty slick to have a standard for graphically encoding information on paper so that it could be easily captured, interpreted and routed via camera phone. For example, if the system was put together the way I am thinking, one could gather information via forms and tell participants to take a snapshot of the form when they're done. If everything worked properly, the cell phone would decipher a destination email address that was encoded on the form and forward the a digital photograph of the form to the intended recipient. Done well, it could be a nice one-click solution that would replace a lot of hassles arising with faxing and snail mail.