The future of mobile computing

I love these images.*

It’s a tale of what our future may look like. In many respects it’s happening now, albeit in a crude form, via apps available for the JesusPhone like Locly, AroundMe and Snaptel.

Locly and Aroundme instantly provides your phone with relevant information pertaining to your immediate location, aggregated from sources like flickr, twitter, blogs and wikipedia. Snaptel processes photos taken by your phone of real-world objects such as books, CDs, DVDs (etc) — and then returns information gleaned from the net, right then and there, allowing you to purchase or do price comparisons based on shops in your vicinity. They are crude apps right now, but a critical start for how we use connected devices digital devices in the future. They will get better.

The pics below are not new, but they remind me of what devices of the future may look like (from the PetitInvention blog), and how location-specific, contextual mobile search may work.

This could apply to location specific/real-time social networking too: Imagine being able to hold up your phone or transparent digital device against a person you’ve just met or passing by. You’d instantly have information returned about that person within seconds, gleaned from an automatic web, public profile and social network search — and then have the ability to add him/her to your network. It would be instant insight into the guy standing right in front of you. It may even be instant karma too. Imagine what it would do to the dating world?

Could this be what the world is going to be like soon?

* This post carries a buzz-word warning.