Camera as Data Capture Device

Becca at The Verge blew my mind last night with a comment she made on Vergecast this week when talking about traditional cameras as compared to smartphone cameras.

It boils down to they are pretty capable cameras, but the way that we use them has adapted to data capture devices more than anything else.

In a restaurant you like? Snap a picture on the way out to remember it. It’s geo tagged, the text in the image can be searched using OCR, it’s faster than having to have some sort of system of storing notes. I don’t know why this hadn’t fully occurred to me but it’s definitely the case. The more I think about it, the more I think the super computer in my pocket is becoming a tricorder from Star Trek. The new Google Pixel has a temperature sensor and my phone has LiDAR.