Anyone who drinks Pepsi or reads a fashion magazine has come into contact with Blippar, the image recognition and augmented reality app that connects users with a huge number of products and services by serving a layer of brand-based interactive content.
Today at SXSW, Blippar’s CEO and founder
Ambarish Mitra announced an upcoming new version of the app that focuses
on non-brand visual search, allowing users to delve more deeply into a
vaster array of both products and real world objects.
Blippar’s brand orientation isn’t going
anywhere, but Mitra seeks to expand the app’s focus into an
all-encompassing and universal visual search engine to complement text-
and link-based engines like Google and Bing.
“The new Blippar is about visual search — it will still
have shades of the old Blippar where we’ll work with all the brands and
give them the singing and dancing content,” Mitra told TNW. “But on most
other things, everyday stuff, it will literally act like a visual
search engine and give you more utility than singing dancing AR.”
Visual Search, which will launch in mid-April is a
complete overhaul of the Blippar app. Accompanied by a totally new
interface, it also will recognize new classifications of real world
objects from books to movies to DVDs and eventually from apples to
puppies.
The puppy, Zoe, is being held by her mom for the Blippar demo.
With the new
Blippar app, you will be able to view any object via your mobile
device’s camera. This image activates Blippar’s digital search and
serves up relevant information directly from the local area.
“The new version of Blippar will bring a
new world of interaction to search that removes the cultural perceptions
from objects,” Mitra said. “The old Blippar was about monetizing
brands; the new Blippar will be more about satisfying people’s curiosity
about anything around them.”
Initially, the new version will be
targeted to English-speaking countries with Blippar recognizing all
English-language album covers, DVD covers, fiction books and movie
posters. Blipping such an item will bring up a range
of contextual information. An album cover may expose access to videos
of the band, a place to buy tickets to a performance, reviews, news,
tweets or photos.
But what about the puppy? “When you blip the puppy,” said
Mitra, “you know what puppy it is, its history and genealogy, how to
look after it, if there’s a vet nearby, the dog sitters and dog walkers —
all the connecting points of information. It’s almost like that puppy
becomes its own portal.”
All this knowledge is driven through Blippar’s AR engine.
The app’s location-based predictive computing uses both deep learning
and artificial intelligence to personalize results for each user.
“Our robots access that information from the Web, make it
user friendly and give it to the user on the fly. Even the color of the
dog and the palette will be selected by the bots.”
Blippar is available for iOS, Android and Windows Phone.