By bringing together cloud-based image recognition and the Vuforia augmented reality platform, entire new landscapes are opened up in the mobile shopping space. Customers can simply point their mobile at various things and trigger highly-engaging, large-scale interactive media solutions that benefit the brand marketers, retailers, and developers as much as they do the consumer.
Senior Business Director at QCOM, Jay Wright, called it a major step forward for the company’s augmented reality platform and underscored the powerful new capabilities that cloud-base image recognition presents to developers from a monetization standpoint, as well as the long-term brand recognition and customer relationship vectors such engaging content can produce. This technology solution as a whole represent a sort of breakthrough and reverse engineering of the online shopping experience, bringing the granular, data/user-driven online shopping experience to the retail environment, empowering customers while engaging them through content that seeds positive product and shopping experience memories directly in the target market.
The kind of sleek, ultra-modern shopping experiences this tech fusion makes possible are still so nascent that it seems like an entirely new world of possibilities has opened up for brand marketing. Immediate, detailed information is available in an intuitive fashion as users simply point the mobile at signage and branding, setting up a rudimentary associative pattern where actual iconography and branding is seen as a key to unlocking a treasure trove of information. This kind of extremely user-empowering shopping experience is a major hook and the solution is a tantalizing vector for companies like top U.S. apparel designer, manufacturer, and distributor, American Apparel Inc., with whom QCOM has formed a key partnership.
Ever since major mobile industry conference Uplinq’s 2012 keynote from QCOM Board Chairman and CEO, Dr. Paul Jacobs, American Apparel, and Qualcomm have worked together to advance this AR solution, proving to the entire industry the true potential of the technology. This latest announcement of full cloud-based image recognition support only sweetens the deal, making it easier than ever to create as-yet-unseen commerce experiences.
One of the first mobile augmented reality marketing platform developers to integrate Vuforia, Blippar, which has streamlined the entire business of traditional marketing for UK brands/publishers (750k or more users across 150 campaigns) to the point where the term ‘blipp’ has almost become synonymous with AR, is rapidly moving through strenuous trials of the new cloud-based recognition feature. This is a huge win for a company like Blippar, which is going to be able to offer its global portfolio of brands incredible new target market engagement choices.
Currently in developer beta (available by request, or to get more information, through QCOM’s Austria Research Center), this incredible new feature of the Vuforia platform digs deep into QCOM’s bag of computer vision tech competencies and will offer an immediate way for print media and advertising, as well as packaging in general, to take on a whole new interactive dimension. With pricing and commercial availability of the feature set looking for a Fall announcement date this year, QCOM has quite the little engine on their hands and with full support for over 400 smartphones/tablets, in active development with over 300k developers worldwide (landing in some 1k different apps), the new, improved Vuforia platform is going to make even more of a name for this 25-year industry veteran mobile technology innovator.
Or to learn more about the Vuforia platform, visit www.developer.qualcomm.com/vuforia
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