Ricoh offers mobile visual search platform

Ricoh Innovations Corporation (RIC), a Silicon Valley-based subsidiary of Ricoh Company introduces an augmented reality technology platform which integrates visual search to mobile devices. RIC which was set up in India in February 2012 launched its first product ‘Ocutag,' a mobile visual search platform.

The company's Visual Services and Solutions Business unit also announced its first customer for Ocutag - Disney UTV Digital has launched its ‘UTV Stars' mobile app powered by the Ocutag platform. The Augmented Reality feature called Snap Search connects users to Bollywood stars and allows them to click a snap of a movie poster to provide easy access to customized content like movie trailers, behind the scenes videos, tweets, and pictures.

"The mission for our new Visual Services and Solutions Business Unit is to understand and interpret the world's visual information to provide an enhanced human experience. High-performance, large-scale mobile visual search plays an important role in realizing that mission," stated Dr Nikhil Balram, president and CEO of Ricoh Innovations.

"We are proud to be a part of Disney UTV's next-generation mobile app, demonstrating an exciting new way that companies can use Ricoh's Ocutag platform to deliver the value of visual search to their customers," added Dr Balram.

The Ocutag platform enables companies to engage customers by presenting targeted, customizable and actionable information. Any image, including those on TV screens, posters, magazines, catalogs and product packaging, can connect users to digital marketing content such as text, video, purchase options and access to social networks.

"With the UTV Stars App, our focus was to provide an engaging and immersive Bollywood experience. The Ocutag platform helps us deliver just that with the innovative experience of direct access content of their favourite movies at their fingertips with a simple click of a movie's poster and associated media," said Sameer Pitalwalla, Director, Video & Celebrity, Disney UTV.

The platform is technology agnostic and supports Android, iOS and Windows phones. The Ocutag mobile visual search platform provides developers with open APIs and online services to enable and support the integration of visual search into mobile apps. It uses the unique and proprietary Ricoh Visual Search technology that has over ninety patents granted or pending, to deliver industry-leading performance with fast response times and high accuracy, while supporting large databases to satisfy the most demanding of applications. Also provided is access to comprehensive, easy-to-use tools for developers and content experts, as well as rich analytics and extensive support.