TomSoft

Camera as input devices….

January 6th, 2006

Just discovered the “littlespringsdesign” blog, which pointed out some really interesting usage about usage of camera within phones, in this entry:

Mobot does exclusively marketing, but they also have a more general image recognition technology. They target things like allowing users to take pictures of movie posters to get movie info or tickets, brand logos, CD covers, or any sort of printed advertisement to get information or purchase related merchandise (such as ringtones). I expect that the biggest issue with their vision of taking a picture of something like a movie poster rather than a special bar code is that not every movie poster would be in the database, leading to needing to put an extra message on the movie poster - or user frustration and eventual product abandonment.

Neven Vision appears to have a technology that is similar to, but slightly more generalized than, PaperClick (who specializes in bar codes). Neven Vision’s marketing tool, iScout, uses visual hyperlinks to indicate “clickable” (pict-able?) items. They also have a more generalized product allowing users to take a picture of any product or picture of a product (such as TV or a print ad) that would allow the user to go to an internet site that has the product for sale. Again, until the majority of products are in the database this is likely to result in user frustration and abandonment of the product.

Technorati Tags: wireless, mobile, pictures

Entry Filed under: Wireless