Future cellphones may act as a tourist guides. Thanks to Pechtl and Geiger who are co-owners of the Germany-based SuperWise Technologies AG which has developed the Apollo image-recognition system that lies behind what they call the "eye-Phone." This novel use of satellite technology combines three of today's modern technologies: Satellite navigation localization services, object recognition and relevant information retrieval from the Internet. The key to the eye-Phone system is the object recognition done by the Apollo software. The software can recognize objects from images; is self-learning, and after a short, simple training session can identify any object in the world. To use the technology, all that a tourist needs to do is to take a photograph of a thing of interest with a phone, and select the item with the cursor.

It could be a building, a mountain, a tree, plant or a special event such as a local festival. The pre- processed information on the selected object will then be sent back to the mobile phone, via the Internet in real time. A prototype of this gadget should be ready by mid-2008.

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