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Here's some new technology coming our way soon (it already exists in Japan):

With a wave, the phone can read encoded information on everyday objects and translate that into videos, pictures or text files on its screen: House hunters, driving past a for-sale sign, stop and point their cellphone at the sign. With a click, their cellphone screen displays the asking price, the number of bedrooms and baths and lots of other details about the house.

Of course the ramifications for turbo-charging our already overly-marketed lives is pretty easy to gage, there are a few truly innovative ways this new technology might add value to our lives:

In Japan, McDonald's customers can already point their cellphones at the wrapping on their hamburgers and get nutrition information on their screens. Users there can also point their phones at magazine ads to receive insurance quotes, and board airplanes using their phones rather than paper tickets. In the United States last fall, the Canadian alternative rock band Barenaked Ladies placed the codes on concert posters. The publisher Prentice Hall is including the codes in a new marketing textbook for undergraduates so that they can get updates on case studies using the codes. Supermarkets stick them on meat and egg packaging to give expiration dates and even the names of the farmers who produced them.

It seems like this technology is already highly developed in Japan:

One of the most popular uses in Japan has been paperless airline tickets. About 10 percent of the people who take domestic flights of All Nippon Airways now use the codes on their cellphones instead of printed tickets.

Yasuko Nishigai, 22, used her cellphone recently to buy a ticket from Tokyo to the Japanese tropical island of Okinawa. To board her flight, she waved the code on her cellphone screen over a scanner.

"I didn't use a single piece of paper, just my phone," she said.

They even have billboards over there with the bar codes printed large enough to be read by passing motorists' cell phones.

Isn't that something to look forward to?

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