Nintendo DS acts as museum tour guide

We’ve seen iPAQs provide location-based information at the Tower of London, but what about the rest of the world? It seems that you can get yourself a virtual tour guide when you hit up a museum in Japan in the form of a borrowed Nintendo DS Lite. When you come into range of an access point, it automatically updates the dual displays with relevant information. The intuitive touchscreen interface makes menu navigation a breeze, but if the demo units in video game stores are any indication, they’re going to get scratched up awfully quickly.

One extra feature that I find particularly interesting is that you can instantly get a copy of any particular painting along the way by beaming a message over to their printers (via WiFi), collecting it when on your way out of the museum. Nifty.