Image recognition remains a technology with a lot of potential in regards to mobile marketing. It poses the best chance of widespread adoption down the road and can offer a unique experience to the end-user without being overly complex and difficult to understand and use.
Image recognition technologies have long been tested over the years with little advancement for true usable recognition in the long-run, but a new image-recognition system developed by European researchers has the ability to actually hyperlink reality, or say they say. The “MOBVIS” system, as it’s currently being called, can recognize individual buildings in a photo you take with your camera-phone, for example, and then apply icons that hyperlink to information about the building. Simply by looking at a picture, the system knows where you are and can tell what you’re looking at.
The system can be applied to mapping data, such as Google’s street view data, and instantly hyperlink individual objects in the imagery to whatever you desire. To me, the obvious benefit of all this is the extreme mobile marketing platform it could provide. Imagine sitting at a bench in a new city you’re not familiar with and simply snapping a photo of the nearby street. The device could instantly return hyperlinked images of the storefronts on the street with coupons, menus, etc. or you could even learn about the history of certain buildings, etc. with hyperlinked Wikipedia articles. The possibilites are endless, but it would open a whole other avenue of highly-targed mobile marketing with the potential of huge returns and success rates.
Now whether or not the new MOBVIS system can truly “hyperlink reality” is still up for discussion, but it still seems promising. The only problem is it falls in the same category as QR codes and other new-age methods that will be slow to catch on. If you ask me, nothing else has the potential mobile image recognition does, especially when it comes to mobile marketing.
