Scoble is currently featuring an excellent video demonstration of Nokia's take on augmented reality, it's called Point and Find.

Smart recognition of analogue signals and their subsequent translation into meaningful information is perhaps the most important movement in computing right now. Spinvox, Everynote and now Point and Find all point to a future where knowledge is infused into the very fabric of society. The printing press unlocked information, knowledge, art and human expression, these cutting edge technologies will push this paradigm to a whole new level. How's that for hyperbole on a Friday morning! ^_-

I'll explain the basic premise of Point and Find (as I understand it) by using an example. Let's imagine that I want to bring augmented reality to my home town. I load up the Point and Find app on my N95 8GB, I then walk around town photographing important landmarks and buildings from various angles, tagging them as I go and adding knowledge to the photos in the form of voice, text, links, etc. The Point and Find application will then take my photos, my tagged 'knowledge' and a GPS location and upload them to Nokia's secret Point and Find HQ. Once sat on Nokia's servers this little packet of information will be convert into a kind of 'reality tag'. By analysing my photos and photos of the same location taken by other users, the Point and Find server application can (using colour and shape recognition) create a highly compressed fingerprint of the scene. The reality tag then gets sent back to me for inclusion in my 'World' and will also get stored on Nokia's servers so that other Point and Find users can be granted access to this tag. To see what happens next just check out the video above. It’s not too hard to image how powerful this new tool could be to businesses, but I’m sure it will be most appealing for personal use too.

Anyway, the whole thing is pretty splendid, and is quite possibly one of the most important things that Nokia have developed in the last 10 years.