Shazam recently announced that it will no longer focus solely on recognizing music and that the app will also allow you to “Shazam” objects in the future.

Shazam is a mobile application that, by using the microphone of your mobile, recognizes “that one song” within a few seconds. For this purpose, it seems a logical choice to use the camera to recognize objects. Now it is relatively a lot easier to recognize a song via your microphone than to recognize an object with, for example, your camera. Music is made up of sound waves that can be compared to the sound you just recorded with your mobile phone.

Sound waves are relatively easy to compare with each other.

However, a newly taken photo can be much more difficult for a computer to compare with other images. Colors and shapes can of course be compared, but the object you are photographing at that moment may be in a different environment, has a different light (colors) and you see it from a different angle (shapes). The colors and shapes do not always match well enough for a match.

You can eliminate this problem by using iBeacons. iBeacons are small Bluetooth transmitters that can detect where you, with your mobile phone, are at that moment. In an environment with many small objects that are close together - such as a store shelf - iBeacons difficulty distinguishing individual objects. A camera would be a better solution here. However, when it comes to larger objects, where there is at least a meter between each object, iBeacons make it possible to recognize an object much faster and more accurately than Shazam is currently able to recognize even a song!

From Us and iBeacons

At Van Ons we are also constantly working on new technologies and so are the iBeacon technology. This year, in collaboration with Sound and Vision, we made an iBeacon case for the queue at the Top 2000 café. Read more about this case here.

Interested in an iBeacon application? Then contact us!