Visual Search & Augmented Reality

Multimedia, social media content, and interaction are common means to attract customers in shopping. However these features are not always fully available for customers when they go shopping in physical shopping centers. We propose Smart Shopping Assistant, a multimedia and social media augmented system on mobile devices to enhance users’ experience and interaction in shopping. The system turns a regular mobile device into a special prism so that a customer can enjoy multimedia, get useful social media related to a product, give feedbacks or make actions on a product during shopping. Smart Shopping Assistant is specified as a flexible framework to take advantages of different visual descriptors and web information extraction modules. The system can be used to attract more customers and to build an online social community of customers to share their interests in shopping.

Reading traditional newspapers or magazines is a common way to get latest information about events or new products. However these printed materials only provide readers with static information. Readers may want to know more detail information about some product in an article or to watch video clips related to an event mentioned in a news right at the moment when they read that article or news. We propose Intelligent Digital Newspaper, a system with mobile devices that can provide extra information and multimedia for readers by applying augmented reality to traditional magazines. A user can enjoy extra rich multimedia information on a product or a news on his/her mobile device just by looking at an article in a traditional magazine through his/her mobile device. The system detects which article in which page of a magazine that is being displayed in a mobile device and provides a reader with related information and multimedia objects.