Nokia, the world’s biggest mobile phone supplier, is developing a new kind of navigation instruction system for mobile phones. With landmark-based navigation you won’t even need to know your address or cross streets to get directions. You just take a picture of a nearby landmark, like the Golden Gate Bridge, with the camera in your mobile phone. Then, Nokia will match your photo with other landmark photos in its mapping database, and tell you where you are. Instructions to your destination are given by red arrows added to pictures, text or voice.
The picture is sent to a server and there matched to the right picture in the database, and you get the instructions to your phone. In Nokia’s “mobile tourist guide” feature you get even further information on the landmark, for example that the Golden Gate Bridge was completed in 1937 and it has the second longest suspension bridge main span in the US.
You may not even need to send a photo to the database, they may be automatically downloaded to your phone. “When you arrive in a new place, the GPS in your mobile spots where you are and sends you a smaller database of pictures of the landmarks in your surroundings. This way the service works faster,” Research Fellow Kari Pulli of the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, Calif