Blippar Introduces Image Recognition And AR Advertising On Google Glass

Blippar has come a long way in a short time, bringing lightning-fast image recognition and augmented reality to mobile advertising. But today, the company steps away from smartphones and puts on the wearables hat.

The company has implemented image recognition technology into Google Glass, in what Blippar claims is the first-ever image recognition tech on the platform.

CEO Ambarish Mitra showed off the app at MWC in Barcelona, displaying how Blippar on Google Glass can quickly recognize images, products, and even faces of people.

As it stands now, Blippar is a mobile application that allows users to explore interactive advertising through augmented reality and image recognition.

Users can scan a brand logo or the universal 'Blip' symbol, and unlock all kinds of interesting content from the brand. The service already has almost 5 million users worldwide, and more than 750 brands and publishers are on the platform. Blippar is currently available on iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone devices.

With Glass, Blippar is looking to expand the reach of this technology, which goes well beyond scanning a simple QR code to actually recognizing and processing unique images, and then delivering up information based on those images.

Other image recognition apps have sprouted up on the Google Glass platform, though Blippar claims to be the first to enable this functionality properly.

With only a few thousand users, Google Glass isn't necessarily ripe for the plucking, but in the words of Mitra, it could very well be the next big thing.

'Glass today can be likened to what mobile phones were in early nineties,' said Mitra. 'We at Blippar anticipate that if Glass reaches a couple million users in its first year of launch, it will be a good business opportunity for us to develop in the space. We are investing in the potential of Glass.'

According to the CEO, the biggest challenge in building image recognition technology onto a wearable is the fact that image recognition is hardware intensive, while everything about the hardware on wearables is meant to be lighter, leaner, and more compact.

For now, Blippar's AR/IR tech for Google Glass is just being demo'ed at Mobile World Congress, but it will likely be made available to Google Glass owners in the future.