Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

Now for something a little different: Evolution Robotics is introducing a visual search engine to the iPhone that will be available in Japan some time in June, and will utilize Visual Pattern Recognition (ViPR) technology. But hat is a visual search engine?

There’s an interesting demo on YouTube you can check out. Basically, the user can take a photo of a book, DVD, or CD on their iPhone (the example given is a DVD cover of “Finding Nemo”) and send out the picture to the search engine, which will email back a description of what was photographed along with relevant links to YouTube or iTunes.

It seems kind of ridiculous (why not just Google it?) but it sure is cool. But Evolution Robotics (owned by Bandai) seems to think it’s useful.

“ER Search is an entirely new way for connecting consumers with content and companies,” said Satoshi Oshita, CEO of Bandai Networks. “Because ER Search runs on mobile phones, searches happen when and where the customer is, as soon as they see something that they’re interested in. Additionally, the fact that a customer simply has to click a picture of a product or advertisement, makes the search process far easier and immediate than anything that has been available before.”

I could see some use for this if you see something you don’t recognize, like a signpost or a note in a foreign language, that you could take a picture of and then have it translated. That would be rather cool.

Thanks to Gizmodo for the heads-up.

Technorati Tags: evolution robotics, vipr, visual pattern recognition, visual search engine, iphone