Fruity toymaker Apple has patented 33 new things at the US Patent and Trademark Office. Amongst the patents is the usually dull stuff including flexible cabling, scrolling lyrics but it seems that Jobs' Mob has been working on doing things with the iPhone and the iPod touch's camera.

One focuses on object identification and the other on face recognition. The object-identification filing describes a system in which a handheld's camera captures an image of an object either in visual light or infrared, then compares that image with information stored over a network. The network then asks the you what information about that object you'd like to download, then provides it.

According to the patent. You could simply point your iPhone at a work of art and quickly be presented with info about it. It will also try to flog you T-shirts featuring that work in the museum store. By using the iPhone's GPS and digital compass could also enable the system to provide location-based things like restaurants and tourist attractions.

The face-recognition filing describes two different systems. One looks for a face and another matches what it sees with a database of whom it knows. Of course this will only work if Apple can get is toy's battery to last longer than five minutes.