Smartphones are incredible pieces of technology that can help you do almost anything you desire while on the go. You can write emails while sitting in a subway, look up obscure facts while standing in an elevator, and coordinate a ride home while mingling at a party. The list goes on and on. However, despite all its uses, the smartphone often serves the purpose of disconnecting us from our physical surroundings. While it can give us facts, figures, data, and access to people around the world, it rarely – outside of mapping services – provides direct contact with your immediate locality.

Slowly this is changing, though. In a world where range of technologies, T1 included, can support data transmitted by services such as PBB, MPLS-TP, and mpls networks, there are countless ways for two devices in physical proximity to communicate with each other. Simply by holding your smartphone against an object, therefore, can translate into an instantaneous transmission of information from that object to your phone, or vice versa.

This ability to connect with its surroundings is an increasingly important smartphone use – a use that stands to only gain in prominence in the near future. While the applications for this are incredibly wide-ranging and varied, here are some of the main ways that you can expect to interact with your surroundings using your smartphone in the next several years – if you do not already do so.

Payments

Carrying a wallet filled with cash and credit cards looks like it will, someday, become an outdated practice. This is because people can now enter their credit card information into smartphone programs. Then, when they go to buy something, they simply have to wave their phone in front of a special scanner. While security concerns and a lagged adaption by retailers have slowed the growth of this technology, we can surely expect to regularly see it in the near future.

Information

We already use our smartphones to search Google or Wikipedia to learn about something that we are physically encountering. Soon, you’ll be able to take this a step further: by holding your phone in front of a painting, or a car, or a certain type of plant, your phone will be able to process that image and tell you exactly what it is you’re looking at. This is already available for identifying types of flowers, although the technology is still being perfected.

Shopping

Similarly, waving your phone in front of an item at the store will soon allow you to read detailed information about that item and to see a demo of it being used. A select number of retailers, Home Depot foremost among them, already offer this service. Some companies plan to furthermore provide the price offered by competitors’ websites, thus allowing you to price compare while at the store and to leave that store confident with your purchase – or, conversely, with your lack thereof.

These are just a few of the many ways that smartphones will more concretely help people interact with their surroundings in the near future. While it may make your life easier and more complicated at the same time, it undoubtedly will leave you more informed than before.