We are now starting to see the arrival of GPS chips in cameras. Why? Well, so that photos can be tagged with their latitude and longitude. Then when you upload your photos to a computer, they can be plonked onto a map — nifty little trick, and I’m sure people will come up with plenty of other neat ways of using this extra data.
But just wait until Galileo (the European Space Agency’s rival to US-based GPS) goes live. Galileo will provide far higher resolution co-ordinates, potentially narrowing your position down to within a few inches. Combine that with the gyroscopes already build into many higher end digital cameras, which are able to determine the orientation of the camera, and online geotagging — the practice of marking up information on the web with geographic co-ordinates — and you end up with a camera which doesn’t just take pictures, but knows which famous landmark you’ve decided to take a snap of!