Cameras as input devices

Tags: Business,  Design,  Devices,  Location (LBS)
November 23, 2005 by Barbara

As I've written in the past, one of the wonderful aspects of mobile devices is the availability of alternate input devices such as voice and camera. A recent News.com article on camera phone search technology describes several companies using the camera as web input.

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.

If the above technologies are possible, then it certainly should be possible for some travel and location based technologies to use the camera as an input. Imagine a visitor's bureau uploading pictures of their entire tourist region. A tourist could then take a picture of anything in the area, get directions, or further information on any location. This would be more accurate than most current GPS systems, with the additional benefit that it could work indoors (like in shopping malls).


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4 Comments

  1. Ms. Barbara,
    Thanks for your comments. There are many Neomedia shareholders who have followed you closely since “Integrating the Internet with the Physical World” was posted.
    Do you think Paperclick with Mobot could be the marketing wedding of the year?

    Comment by Le The Doanh — November 24, 2005 @ 6:17 am

  2. I’d actually be more interested in Paperclick and Neven Vision, because both companies do marketing but also have more general solutions. I like Paperclick’s marketing solution because of the clear indication that it is “clickable” (i.e., the bar code), that uses such compact space on a physical artifact.

    Comment by Barbara — November 24, 2005 @ 7:49 am

  3. Ms. Barbara,

    I also Enjoy reading your commets about connecting the physical world to the internet.
    I work for a telecommunication industry and see there is a lot of noise being made about cell phones working with this 3G network (dsl speed). If we have the phones and the wireless
    high speed connectability , why aren’t we seeing these services that can link me to a website by simply clicking on a barcodeor a logo ? Is there any other technologial barriers that need
    to be addressed?

    Thanks in advance and have yourself a Great Thanksgiving

    Comment by Andrew — November 24, 2005 @ 12:37 pm

  4. Andrew,

    You’ll notice in the original post three separate companies who are already making your question happen, and I believe these are all U.S. companies. My understanding, although I am not an expert on what is happening in Europe, is that there is more adoption there.

    In the US, the biggest barrier is more in user behavior. Every time I talk to a “normal person” (as opposed to a technofile) about internet on their phone, I get told “I don’t have a need for that.” As long as there are only a few things of minimal interest to the average consumer, that’s where we’ll be stuck.

    At the same time, advertisers are aware of the adoption level amongst adults (as contrasted with youth). Thus they target youth with these campaigns. As more youth use camera + internet on their phones (or camera + messaging), more advertisers are interested in using the medium. Other youth want to interact either with the advertisers or with their cohort, and they eventually start using the internet. This type of “network effects” is what will make adoption grow.

    So, technological barriers? Not much, especially with the marketing platform technologies many companies have. Just make the products easy to use, the cost reasonable and logical (don’t make me pay for ad content!), and seed the technology into your user base. Once it grows to a certain size, you will have reached “critical mass” and the adoption rate will accelerate significantly.

    Comment by Barbara — November 26, 2005 @ 1:41 pm

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