Now that the new iPhone 3G S has a video camera, TechStars startup Occipital has released an update to its RedLaser app (iTunes link, $1.99) which speeds up barcode scanning by not requiring you to first take a picture. Occipital claims that its “realtime barcode scanner” is the only one which works on phones with both autofocus (the new 3G S) and without (the older iPhone and iPod Touch). Other barcode scanning apps, such as ShopSavvy’s, can also take advantage of the autofocus camera on the 3G S, but can’t do on-the-fly scanning on the older models.
Like other barcode scanning apps, many of which are free, RedLaser looks up price comparisons in an ever-growing product database. The utility of these apps is really determined by how good the back-end database is more than the scanning technology itself. But RedLaser is really more of a technology demo for Occipital, which is developing some some impressive mobile visual search technologies. The scanning technology is available to other developers through an SDK.
Here is a video of the app in action:
I am more excited by what Occipital has in the works for more sophisticated visual-recognition apps. Last year, at a TechStars Demo Day which Don Dodge covered for us, he explained
They can stitch photos together into a panorama, automatically label and tag photos, and construct 3D scenes from your photos. They can zoom in, fly over, step inside buildings…all based on simple photos stitched together into a 3D presentation. They find objects in your photos and link them to the same or similar objects in other photos and stitch them together. This is hard to explain with words, but the visual demo was amazing.
Below is a video of a prototype visual-navigation app Occipital is working on. When can I get that on my iPhone?
WOW.
This truly rocks.
I guess the prototype can be achived with the new Compass and using Google’s Street View right? no need to render your own images that way
Er… Google Street Maps?
holy freaking cool technology batman… that Augmented Reality is truly amazing… Could the same sort of end result not come from google streetview or whatever its called? Because mapping that kind of information would take forever for just a block, let alone a city or multiple cities…
They are using data provided by earthmine http://www.earthmine.com so it seems like it could be scalable – here is their blog post about the project http://occipita...ian-navigation/
*cough*Vaporware*cough*
Not vaporware if it is in fact already running on the iphone.
The problem I have with this one is the $15K funding. That’s not even enough to buy a pair of decent MySQL servers and a pair of frontend app servers, let alone the networking gear and colocation/bandwidth costs.
In other words, it is a ShopSavvy copycat on the iphone without any money backing it up.
Oh, do shut up
1) The *vast* majority of iPhone apps are bootstrapped.
2) The $15k is because they were a TechStars company last year.
3) These guys have spent the last six months eating Ramen working on a number of cool iPhone apps, including Red Laser. These are the type of entrepreneurs most of us still celebrate. Young, smart, driven to create cool software and willing to make sacrifices to do so.
An apology wouldn’t be out of the question, me bucko.
This is great… Wishing these guys the best of luck.
Nice video – I’ll confirm we are releasing new Grocery iQ with scanning.
Steven
Scanning in the generic sense, did not mean to endorse any specific scanning solution.
Does the live bar code reading require a jail broken phone, or is there now an approved API to access live camera image?
Nice work Occipital.
Erick: The iPod Touch doesn’t have a camera. Unless you have a new one we shouldn’t know about yet
looks cool, but how would this work on the touch without a camera?
Gotta love giving more power to the consumer – truly genius idea!
Android has had real-time barcode scanners since day one. Android FTW!
15K in funding? How is that possible?
They’re another bad-ass TechStars alumni company.
Smart to focus on being the “best of breed” bar code scanning API for all iPhone/Android apps, and not the app maker.
Reminder – concert tickets have bar codes, business potential off the chart for mobile social iPhone app that connects people by the concerts they are going to/currently at/have been to in the past
But lets make sure this isn’t limited to just finding the cheapest price/customer reviews. How about a look-up for the environmental impact of manufacturing the product? Employee-rights rating of the factory where the item was produced? How far is it from the factory to your current location?
lol..Why are people so amazed at something that came out on Android since day 1…lol these iphone users are amazing.
what’s android
It is impressive as the camera sucks on the original iphone 3g. They did a lot, but even then the program is far less than perfect.
Awesome that it’s available as an SDK, there should be some awesome apps coming out in the near future using this.
Someone over at Occipital has good taste in music. I want to know what’s playing in the background of both vids but Midomi can’t figure it out.
Nice.
How complicated directions can it figure out? The one in the demo was pretty straightforward, how about something that involves multiple turns, intersections, etc.?
This is a niche application at best. There aren’t many of us who are that dumb that they can’t follow a GPS map…
Good for grandpa maybe
The music in the RedLaser video is Ratatat Beats #1.
Ratatat is a kickass band from NYC, I started listening to them when I used to live there. The song seemed to fit with the scanning part of the video, so we added it in =).
Wish they could do OCR of text, coupons, newspapers with their technology.
Awesome. I hope someone grabs that SDK and makes an app that I can use at home, scanning stuff as I use it, and then producing a shopping list for me.
What is the current state of the enforceability Neomedia patents on barcode scanning on mobiles looking up remote URLs? Have people figured a way around that for shopping comparison applications ( I am hoping they have)
Wow, bought and downloaded RedLaser and after about 20 scans on 3G S I finally got one to work. 5% success rate! Hooray!
Were you using the photo scan mode? We had to put in an update to make RedLaser compatible with the 3Gs, should be available soon.
If you were getting this on realtime scan mode, then were you perhaps trying books? We don’t support EAN (books/European codes) in realtime scan mode yet, but we will soon. Also, we admittedly don’t work well on curved barcodes, but we’ll be fixing this soon as well in an update.
I’m really surprised Apple hasn’t built any sort of barcode scanning stuff for the iPhone internally. If you look carefully at those little gadgets the salesmen use in the Apple stores, you’ll notice they run Windows CE.
Okay, for .99 this is a really cool app and any updates will be welcomed, but it is already very useful. Thanks Occipital.
I guess it can be achieve using built-in Compass and and Google Street View, right?