A new technology from Ricoh Innovations called Visual Search may revolutionize the relationship between print and digital content.
At Ricoh Innovations we are developing visual search technology for paper documents. Our mobile visual search algorithms create “clickable paper” — documents that have the interactivity of web pages and can be used anywhere a camera phone can connect to the Internet. Our full-page visual search techniques instantaneously find documents that match what’s scanned on a copier.
This means that any page of text can have digital content added to it, without the use of QR codes or similar technology.
Kat Meyer, from O’Reilly’s TOC blog, provides an excellent summary of why this technology is so interesting
Why Publishers Should Be Excited About It:
It’s relatively painless.
For one thing, publishers can take full advantage of RI’s visual search technology regardless of how their books are designed or printed. Because RI’s technology utilizes pattern recognition (as opposed to technologies such OCR), the visual search is not dependent on language, font or characters.
Oh, the data possibilities!
There’s not a marketing person in publishing who doesn’t salivate over the opportunities digital provides for consumer research. For books connected via visual search, the apps “phone home” with data on a regular basis. RI’s visual search app records and reports which pages are scanned the most, the number of unique users that are scanning the location, the geo location of user, etc. Basically, any data that you can acquire they can track.
Why Readers Should Be Excited About It:
For “booky” book lovers and the digitally inclined alike, books embedded with RI’s visual search offer the best of both worlds. Pretty bound books, enriched (at your convenience) with easily updatable web-based content, and no ugly QR codes to disrupt the reading experience.
A detailed description of the technology is available here.
