Marta and I just returned from Prague. One thing that struck us there was the large amount of time we spent in other people's photographs and videos, or at least within the bounds of their active lenses.

It's sadly inevitable that at some time a tourist mecca like Prague will capitalise on this, introducing a kind of 'scenic copyright' with a pay-per-click extension. Documenting a scene, or an item in a scene, would be legally validated as a kind of value deriving use, much in the same way as paying to see an exhibition is justified. Scenic copyright already exists, largely under the banner of anti-terrorism (bridges, important public and private buildings fall under such laws), but there are cases where pay-per-view tourism is already (inadvertently) working.

A friend Martin spoke of his experiences in St. Petersberg, where people are not allowed to photograph inside the subway, something enforced under the auspice of protecting the subway from terroristic attack. However for a small fee you can be granted full right to take photographs. Being that it's very expensive to have city wardens patrolling photographers it will no doubt be automated, where Digital Rights Management of a scene would be enforced at a hardware level.

Here's a hypothetical worst case. Similar to the chip level DRM in current generation Apple computers (with others to follow), camera manufacturers may provide a system whereby tourists must pay a certain fee allowing them to take photographs of a given scene. If a camera is found to be within a global position falling under state sanctioned scenic-copyright, the camera would either cease to function at all or simply write out watermarked, logo-defaced or blank images. If you want a photo of the Charles Bridge without "City of Praha" on it, you'll have to pay for it..

A newspaper reporting on a blind convention (a standard for blindness?) in Dallas talks about a text to speech device allowing blind people to quickly survey text in their local environment, further refining their reading based on a series of relayed choices. The device works by taking photographs of the scene and in a fashion similar to OCR, extracts characters from the pixel array, assembles them into words and feeds them to software for vocalisation.

Given the vast amount of text in any compressed urban environment, prioritising information would become necessary for a device like this to deliver information while it's still useful or else utility would be largely lost. The kind of text I'm talking about would include road-signs and building exit points.

Perhaps a position aware tagging system could be added to important signs using triangulated position from multiple RFID tags, bluetooth or other longer range high-resolution positioning system. Signs could be organised by their relative importance using 'sound icons', which in turn are binaurally mixed into a 3D sound field and unobtrusively played back over headphones (much as some fighter pilots cognitively locate missiles). The user would then hear a prioritised aural map of their textual surrounds before selecting which they should first read based on assessment of their current needs.