Nokia's Point and Find technology has been launched and allows you to use your Nokia phone to scan items and locations and get detailed information about them.
We first brought you details of Point and Find last year, saying that it would be out within months. While it took a little longer than expected, the Beta version is now available for use in both the UK and USA, with later versions adding support for other countries.
Nokia Point and Find has been in development for some time and allows users to tap into the power of what is essentially a highly-powered computer in their hands to take a snap shot of a location, a barcode, or other object (such as a cinema poster) and deliver relevant content directly to your handset.
We're not even going to pretend to understand how it works, other than its an image processing and recognition technology that works in real time, so can respond instantly to what you point at. For instance, if you point at a cinema poster, the software will relate your location using GPS and give you ticket pricing and availability in that area. It does this by cross-referencing the object against a database of already tagged objects.
Taking full advantage of the launch are the Body Worlds & The Mirror of Time exhibitions at the O2 in London. The exhibition has an outdoor advertising campaign running across London which, when accessed by Point and Find users, will bring up a whole range of additional information.
One of the cool things about this app is that Nokia has made it open to everyone, so it won't only support Nokia phones but should become a standard across the mobile platform.
As Point and Find is still in Beta phase it only works on a select number of devices at the minute, including: N82, N95, N95 8GB, N76, N81, N81 8GB, E51, E66, 6290, 6124 Classic, 6161 Classic, 6120 Classic, 6110 Navigator and 5700 XpressMusic.