Visual search engine for mobile phone
Visual search from ER will available in iPhone on June.
Human is always hungry, just like what Steve Jobs used to say; Stay Hungry Stay Foolish. A company from Pasadena California called Evolution Robotics Inc. with their ViPR (visual pattern recognition) technology want to proof this I guess. In April 17, 2008 this company in cooperation with Bandai Networks (just remember Tamagotchi) from Japan had announced brand new way for mobile phone users to search data via, not text or sound (like Yahoo and Vlingo did), yet graphics, images, or other visual object. They call it “ER Search”. Cool ……
So how this ER Search gonna works? It’s plain simple.
1. Mobile phone users who want to search should send the related picture to ER’s or Bandai’s servers.
2. After that. Servers will give users search results with content related to that searched object.
The results will be various. YouTube Videos, Wikipedia links, or iTunes Music Store. Furthermore, based on the press release via Gizmodo , this search will allowing users to experience such thing like this.
If they are shopping for wine in a store, they can take a picture of the wine label and get expert reviews and recommendations on the spot. Or, if they are browsing through a catalog and see an item they’d like to buy, they can order it immediately by snapping a picture of the item on the page.
As a student majoring computer science, I believe that this new type of search will be useful. For now or next. However, what make me hesitate on this technology is because ER and Bandai Networks or whatever company use it are likely to rely on their own database plus data from their own users or customers. Hey, they are Web 2.0 ready.
Again, this method or behavior is actually good, but not good enough. At least in the real world within Google and its crawler. If ER, Inc. count only on their users to sum up their database, then they will likely to satisfied those users not. The real solutions is to cooperate with Google, especially because Google has a very nice image search i.e. by keep accepting data from users plus combining those with data from Google servers(sssssssss). Now this is what I mean truly cool and awesome.
Oh yeah, Japanese with KDDI au cell phone had used this ER Search since 2007 while American and iPhone will have it on this June. That’s not bad …
Source: Appletell, Gizmodo, and Press Release by Evolution Robotics Inc
Image courtesy of Evolution Robotics Inc
thanks for the explanation.
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