Cellphone App Developed that Could Allow For 'Pocket Supercomputers'

Jack Spine writes "A robotics researcher at Accenture has given a demonstration of a 'Pocket Supercomputer' — a phone behaving like a thin client. It can be used to send images and video of objects in real time to a server where they can be identified and linked to relevant information, which can then be sent back to the user. 'The camera on the phone is used to take a video of an object — such as a book ... By offloading the processing from a mobile device onto a server, there are few limits on the size and processing power available to be used for the storage and search of images.' To pinpoint the features necessary to identify an object, the image is run through an algorithm called Scale-Invariant Feature Transform, or SIFT, a technology developed by academic David Lowe. The software extracts feature points from a jpeg and makes a match against images in the database. If a match exists then the software on the server retrieves information and sends it back to the user's phone. A 'three-dimensional' image of an object can also be uploaded onto the phone, to look at the virtual object from different angles. The motion-tracking technology Accenture uses for this is a free library of algorithms called Open Computer Vision."

Comments

The age old question

[Pojut]

We really need to stop throwing the supercomputer term around. How do you really define supercomputer? Is it based on number of calcs per second it can do? Size? Hell, my PSP has more power in it than room-filling monstrosities from the 50's...

Re:"Miniature supercomputers"?

[Serapth]

I agree completely, the title is highly misleading. The cyclical nature of our industry does make me laugh though, its like every few years the balance of power between the network and the device shifts and WOW!!! a whole new way of computing!!! Repeat and rinse. How people fail to recognize its the same thing over and over, boggles my mind. Oddly though, the cell phone has basically been a thin client all along, and its only recently with Palms Treos, Windows smartphone, Apple iPhone's, etc... that things started trended towards thick clients again.

Lastly, atleast here in Canada, this idea is completely unrealistic anyways as the bottleneck is essentially the network not the device. A combination of high data charges, no flat rate billing plans and slow networks just doesn't mix well.