Ever find yourself standing at a bus stop, starring at a poster for the latest Hollywood Blockbuster, and wondering "well, looks exciting, but what's it all about?!"? ViPR Visual Search, developed by Evolutionary Robotics, promises an answer. Snap the cover of a CD, DVD or book with your camera phone, and it will analyse it and return a description, YouTube link and iTunes store link. Presumably it could recognise (or be programmed to recognise) the film poster too, saving you the trouble of such hassles as typing the film title into a search engine and selecting a suitable result.

It's already on 3 million phones, and is soon coming as an app for the iPhone through the App Store, which is fast looking set to be an important way of popularising such innovations.

See demo above Cogapp was recently accepted onto Apple's official iPhone Developer Program, so we've been thinking a lot about the potential for the device, and technology like ViPR, in our field. This got me wondering.... How about implementing this in a museum, so information, visitor reviews and audio guides can be activated just by pointing and snapping? How about a children's version with alternative, child-friendly content? It would be an easy, playful and really rather useful way of accessing information when and where curiosity arises. Thinking bigger - what if major art galleries could collaborate on a database, so that when you come across famous works of art you can find out where they are currently on display? It would keep up to date with the movements of famous pieces from one gallery to another, and as you leaf through that book in school or on someone's coffee table, you immediately know where you might have to go to see the piece in the flesh. As technology like this improves, and more and more people start to own capable devices, the possibilities continue to multiply. It's going to be exciting to see how and where such things start appearing. Snap snap!