Idealab firm deploys visual search engine for Japanese carrier

By Mickey Alam Khan

April 21, 2008

Click the picture ...

A Japanese wireless carrier has turned to Evolution Robotics Inc. for technology that will let its customers run online searches by taking pictures of everyday objects with their mobile phone.

KDDI Corp., in conjunction with Japanese mobile content provider Bandai Networks Co. Ltd., will include the ER Search visual search engine on its new spring au line of camera phones. KDDI customers can also download the application for use on older-model au camera phones.

“Because ER Search runs on mobile phones, searches happen when and where the customer is, as soon as they see something they’re interested in,” said Satoshi Oshita, CEO of Bandai, in a statement.

“Additionally, the fact that a customer simply has to click a picture of a product or advertisement makes the search process far easier and immediate than anything that has been available before,” he said.

Evolution Robotics is part of Idealab, a Bill Gross-founded incubator of Internet and technology companies. Idealab is based in Pasadena, CA.

... and see the results

The ER Search mobile search engine is operated by Bandai and powered by Pasadena, CA-based Evolution Robotics’ ViPR visual pattern recognition system.

The ER Search engine works like any other. But it doesn’t require typing in text or scrolling through menus.

So, all mobile users have to do is us the camera on their mobile phone to take a picture of something and begin a search by sending that image to an Evolution Robotics server. The engine then returns the relevant search result content after searching matching images from across the Internet.

For instance, KDDI customers can snap a photo of a music CD that will return links relating to the artist. Other links will also let the consumer listen to clips from the album and buy songs to download on the phone.

In another example, KDDI customers shopping in a wine store can take a photo of the wine label with their mobile phone and quickly get links to reviews and recommendations.  

Also, carrier customers who are browsing through a catalog can take a picture of an item on the page and order it immediately.

Evolution Robotics’ ViPR technology is said to support user-generated content to let mobile-phone users take new photos of objects, images, videos and locations and tag them with links and content to grow the database. That content will show up in results returned to other users who take similar photos, again adding to the visual database.

A video demonstration of Evolution Robotics’ visual search technology running on the Apple iPhone is available at http://www.youtube.com/user/EvolutionRobotics. The iPhone application will launch in June. 

Bandai claims to have deployed ER Search last year on more than 1 million phones in Japan. The company maintains a vast database of images linked to content, including more than 150,000 music DC covers.

The ER Search engine may be available in the United States later this year.

“Our mission is to take aerospace-grade technologies and make them affordable for mass-market applications, and ER Search is a great example,” said Evolution Robotics president/CEO Paolo Pirjanian, in a statement.

“We see this as just the start of a growing market for visual search in Asia and other parts of the globe and are actively working with our partners to expand the range of services that can benefit consumers and companies alike,” he said.