The Royal Mail has announced they are will be releasing "intelligent" stamps.

The stamps are a form of augmented reality where the Internet and the real world combine to provide a more complete experience.

It works by using an application called Junaio image recognition  (which is free) to scan the stamp on your mobile. Once recognised you will be referred to exclusive content which adds extra details to the stamp in question.

One example given is the Great British Railways Edition will refer you to a short film about the Auden Poem "The Night Mail".

It's an interesting idea that will no doubt have a novelty factor to start and will give an interesting way to provide extra details about a subject. We also suppose it would have been rather difficult to fit a whole URL on a stamp to refer people to the details, so in this case the function is even more relevant.

The Royal Mail will be utilising this technology on all of its future special edition stamps.