Hi, Kara is correct. For those of you attended CSUN in March, and recall the iVisit demonstration of SeeStar and SeeScan--well, you were watching a camera cellphone with less than 3 megapixels. It could identify money, and while it is limited in how small print can be, it is surprisingly good.
The difficulty for developers for the iPhone is the "crowd at the door". There are so many developers with good ideas, that Apple is limited in how much attention they can give individual developers. This is both good and bad news. It means that the iPhone will not have everything at once, but it also means that once the flow of new widgets and systems start, it will flow well for a long time. The new iPhone has 256 mb of memory--double the current models, and a 600 mhz processor. Even so, it will have difficulty doing the heavy lifting of processing OCR, or even doing recognition tasks. The iVisit approach revealed at CSUN, depends on a data channel to connect to a desk server to do that processing intensive work. It is likely that will remain just as true of future iPhones for a while. Since some of the desirable applications will take a couple of years to have available to the public, there is plenty of time for an iPhone upgrade by then. Remember, the life cycle of a cellphone is typically 18 months. The greater issues with doing any kind of recognition with a camera on a cellphone have to do with the human factors of how to aim the camera, and know the image is in the field. The process requires a remote server to do the heavy lifting of recognition if you want more than minimal performance. This means a data plan, and reception issues. Even at 600 mhz, and 256 mb memory, resources are scant for serious OCR on the phone. Think of doing that back in 1999 on your PC. Another note of reality for this discussion is to realize that iPhones now are notorious for being power hungry. If one uses an iPhone as many typical users do, the battery does *not* last through the day. There are iPhone kits to provide portable power on the go, to recharge the iPhone. The battery is the weak component. Yes, it would be wonderful to have all those hardware gadgets in one iPhone package, but currently, you can only expect to do that for about half a day. If you want to use your phone after that, you will need to get more power for it. It is not currently realistic to carry around your phone, and ask it to be a cellphone, a portable document reader, an email reader, book reader, music player, GPS navigator, money/object recognizer, color identifier, bar code/RFID reader, etc, and last for 10-12 hours a day while you are on the go, too. There are real trade-offs that will have to be made, and that balancing act takes time to play out. I am currently participating in a study of "best practices" in cellphone design for persons who are blind. We are finding that few phones running MobileSpeaks can survive a day without a recharge. Cellphone companies fudge their numbers by turning out the backlight in 2 seconds, as on the BlackJack 2, and cutting system resources to the bone to make that 8 hours they want to advertise. When we go in, and reset it so it can work with MobileSpeaks, the additional overhead takes a big toll. Just as the manuals say--running bluetooth uses more power, so does MobileSpeaks, or any other screen reading system. GPS uses more power, and those cameras eat power at an incredible rate. In my work with one application on a Mogul, I could drain the battery in about 2 hours at most. Relax, be patient, and enjoy Snow Leopard when it arrives. It may take time for iPhones, or any other phone to catch up to our dreams and desires. Gary --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
