Search visually on your mobile

PASADENA, USA & TOKYO, JAPAN: Evolution Robotics Inc., a leading robotics technology company, in partnership with Bandai Networks Co. Ltd, Japan’s leading mobile content provider, recently announced that KDDI Corp. is including the “ER Search” visual search engine on its new Spring 2008 “au” line of camera phones, and has made it available for download for any KDDI customer with a prior “au” camera phone.

This launch marks a dramatic expansion in the mobile visual search market , which will enable millions of consumers in Japan alone to do online searches by taking pictures of everyday objects with their camera phone.

The deployment of this technology in the mass market also opens up an entirely new range of categories of services for mobile marketing, which is already projected to grow to $24 billion worldwide by 2013.

ER Search is a mobile search engine operated by Bandai Networks and powered by Evolution Robotics’ ViPR visual pattern recognition system. It works essentially like using a traditional search engine, but without having to type any text or go through complicated menus. Instead, users simply snap a picture of something they’re interested in and immediately get back relevant content, all in the palm of the hands.

As an example, KDDI customers will be able to take a picture of a music CD that would return links relating to the artist, hear clips from the album and purchase songs to download on their phone. If they are shopping for wine in a store, they can take a picture of the wine label and get expert reviews and recommendations on the spot. Or, if they are browsing through a catalog and see an item they’d like to buy, they can order it immediately by snapping a picture of the item on the page.

Bandai had already deployed ER Search on over one million phones in Japan in 2007. With this deployment with KDDI, the number of users with access to ER Search will expand by millions, making it even more compelling for companies and advertisers to participate in the service.

ViPR technology supports user-generated content so that users can take new pictures of objects, images, videos or even locations, and tag them with links and content to expand the database. That content will then show up in the results returned to other users who take similar pictures, thus creating a robust world-wide visual database for communities to develop and access.