As a frequent kooaba user you might have already noticed the new features on our Library. We improved the design, increased the performance, and added some great new features:
Shelf view
You can now choose between a list view of your collected items or a nice wooden shelf view. It does feel more like a real library, doesn’t it?
Add items via webcam
You can now add your media collection to your personal Library without using your smart phone. Simply hit the “Add Item” button on your library to activate the webcam.
RSS feed
Subscribe to the RSS feed of your own personal library to access and search it from web and desktop tools.
Sign up now to the Library if you aren’t a registered kooaba user yet and try our new features. Feel free to send us your thoughts!
At this year’s TechCrunch50, we are presenting Interactive Print, a solution that may change the way people read newspapers and magazines. kooaba was selected to participate in TechCrunch50 DemoPit – a showcase of the world’s hottest startups – of more than 1’000 applicants from over 40 different countries.
Tearing out pages, piling them up on a dusty stack of paper, and having difficulties finding them again belongs to the past. Now, smartphone users have the possibility to collect interesting print articles by just taking a picture of them with our mobile application (currently available for iPhone and Android).
After the picture has been taken and transmitted, kooaba’s image recognition technology comes into play: it recognizes the article from the users picture and returns the full original electronic version of the page. The page is also automatically added to the user’s Library. This online collection – in contrast to the traditional stack of paper – takes no physical space, it is neatly organized, and it is easily searchable using full-text search. Moreover, kooaba offers additional features such as rating, recommending, and a list of links to related digital content such as images, videos, music, etc.
Here at kooaba we are always keen on testing the boundaries of the current state-of-the art in image recognition. In cooperation with ETH Zurich we thus create prototypes of novel applications of our image recognition services.
One field of such applications is Augmented Reality. In a nutshell, augmented reality overlays digital information on the real world, e.g. as seen “through” the screen of a mobile phone. Recently severalapplications have appeared on the market, which rely on GPS and compass information to achieve the desired effect. However, these solutions have several shortcomings:
it is difficult to select relevant data for display. Often elements that are not actually visible are labeled on the screen
only stationary objects can be shown, i.e. objects which are bound to a fixed location, since the system relies on GPS in the first place
The combination with image recognition allows for overcoming these challenges. Thus, we asked Aleksander Slater, a Master Student at ETH, to implement an iPhone Augmented Reality system. It connects to our kooaba recognition system for media covers, as well as our landmark recognition engine developed recently at ETH. The result is shown in the video below:
Note how both (stationary) landmarks and (non stationary) media covers can be recognized and displayed on the screen. A click on the label leads to a page about related information. The recognized objects are stored in a history. (We have currently over 7 million media cover items in the kooaba database, and hundreds of thousands of landmarks in our landmark recognition prototype at ETH).
The next video shows the same concept (objects are replaced by pictures, since we didn’t have the Golden Gate Bridge in front of our house) and even combines it with OCR and translation capabilities.
This is all running on an iPhone already today, pretty much in real time (the video was recorded on the iPhone Emulator, just to get better quality). Let us know, if you would to have it on your device
