Games and sports lend themselves to computational photography.

- Photograph a scrabble board with your pieces in front of it, and the N900 works out the best move

- Photograph a chess board after each move, and the N900 produces a standard-format text file documenting the game

- Photograph a bridge hand and the N900 displays the heuristics that you normally work out in your head (high card points, number of losers, etc)

- Sports training: video yourself running and the N900 overlays a golden line showing your gait movement (by tracing out the movement of the knees, feet, hips, and arms)

- Party game: photograph each participant, then the N900 blends pairs of faces. The participant who can guess which two people made up each photo, wins!

- Movement counter, to count any kind of repetitive movement (e.g. number of gym workout moves). Just start the video camera, do one sample move, and let the N900 keep track of how many more you do.

- Accuracy detector. Touch the target area on the N900 screen, then shoot your arrows (or throw your darts, or whatever) and the N900 accumulates stats on how close you got.

And some non-game ideas:

- Weather statistics: photograph the sky, and get a figure for the percentage cloud cover. (Can you photograph the sun without burning out the camera sensor?)

- Height measurer: photograph someone in front of any object of known height, and the N900 tells you how tall that person is. Actually this can be a general "measuring" application.

- When you've forgotten the name of someone who you've met before, just surreptitiously photograph them. The N900 matches them against your previous photos, and displays their name.

- For journalists: photograph a scene, and the N900 tells you how many people are in the scene. I was always amused at the London anti-war rallies, that the ratio between the crowd size as estimated by the press and the police was at least 10:1, and often much more.

- Photograph a windsock to get a readout of the wind speed; photograph a weathervane to get a readout of the wind direction

- Car parking assistant. Your passenger gets out and points the video camera at the parking space. A voice synthesizer on the N900 says "back a bit, straighten out, forward, slightly right, stop".

- Product locator. Don't you just hate it when your supermarket rearranges the shelves and you can't find the olives anymore? Just photograph your old jar of olives at home, then walk up and down the aisles at the supermarket until the camera beeps to say that it has found the olives.

Regards,
Roger