Systems and methods for providing and authoring information related to the physical world

摘要

A system and method capable of reading machine-readable labels from physical objects, reading coordinate labels of geographical locations, reading timestamp labels from an internal clock, accepting digital text string labels as input obtained directly from a keyboard type input device, or indirectly using a speech-to-text engine transforming any other label type information encoding into digital data by some transduction means, and treating these different labels uniformly as object identifiers for performing various indexing operations such as content authoring, playback, annotation and feedback. The system further allows for the aggregating of object identifiers and their associated content into a single addressable unit called a tour. The system can function in an authoring and a playback mode. The authoring mode permits new audio/text/graphics/video messages to be recorded and bound to an object identifier. The playback mode triggers playback of the recorded messages when the object identifier accessed. In the authoring mode, the system supports content authoring that can be done coincident with object identifier creation thereby enabling authored content to be unambiguously bound to the object identifier. In the playback mode, the system can be programmed to accept/solicit annotations/feedback from a user which may also be recorded and unambiguously bound to the object identifier.