10 March 2010

Nokia Working On
X-Ray Scanner Phone Application

In an article titled 'Phones to offer X-ray vision' and published on the smh.com.au portal, an Australian professor, Dr. Christian Sandor, revealed that researchers at the University of South Australia working with Nokia to build an ''X-ray vision'' mobile phone application which it hoped could be introduced in the next two years.

Dr Sandor said the technology could not be used by peeping Toms to see into people's houses because only the exterior views of buildings and streets were held in the databases.

Christian Sandor explained the application worked by using the phone's camera. Users pointed the camera at a building and an image of it would appear on the screen. Then, the image would change to show what was behind the building, as if it was no longer there.

The technology, known as augmented reality, appears to be X-ray vision, but in reality it uses pictures and images that already exist in databases such as Google Earth and Google Streetview.

Augmented reality technologies had only become possible in the last 10 years, Dr Sandor said, because of the development of sophisticated networks such as Google Earth and Streetview.

As well as X-ray vision, the research team has developed two other types of mobile phone applications called Meltvision and Distortvision. Meltvision works using a similar process to the X-ray vision application, but the image of the front of the building ''melts away'' to reveal what is behind.

Distortvision alters the mobile video image so that objects out of the line of sight can be ''bent'' into vision.