There are many apps and services that refer to objects in the real world, e.g. shopping and product centric apps, consumer information apps, cityguides etc. All of these need the user to be able to show which thing they are interested in, typically from a very large range of possibilities. Geoff will explore the problem of reaching out to things in the real world from the mobile app or service. He will illustrate the limitations of the typical text based search interfaces in the mobile environment and seek to convince the audience that they are not a realistic mass market approach in mobile. He will be informing attendees on the wide range of approaches to this including at least:

* barcodes and similar

* visual recognition and search

* location and compass

* tags and NFC

... covering the properties and limitations of each technique, with numerous motivating examples. In general these all provide a way of pointing the device and asking what is that?.