In June, at Snapchat’s annual partner summit, it has announced some more additional for its Camera, the additions include dog breeds, identifying plants, and additional product data, such as nutrition information by just scanning a plant/dog/product by the camera.
Currently, we are seeing the coming steps for this, users are able now to scan wine and food labels to get more data on specific products.
As you can see in the image above, when you click and hold on the screen when you are viewing a barcode for specific products, now you will get a new listing of nutrition information for every item.
You even get review data for wine for example:
The extra product data is simplified through communicating in third party applications – Vivino and Yuka in these examples, you may see the application’s branding at the top of every listing. That gives Snap a range of options, based on a built database, which means that users may scan a range of products to get more data and sights.
Snapchat has added the new dog breed scanner in June, as users have been able to identify products via amazon, and music via Shazam in the tool. The new additions have taken this capacity even further, and be in line with Snapchat’s broader effort to add more interest, and also, Snapchat has partnered with Coca Cola and McDonald’s on promotions that users can scan based on their logos.
Actually, Snapchat has been working on making photos recognition of greater items in the application for a period of time. In 2015, Snapchat has filed a patent that has included an extended summary of what could be possible in its visual recognition tools.
“For example, a photograph including an object recognized as a restaurant may result in the user being presented with photo filters that overlay a menu of the restaurant on the photograph. Or a photograph including an object recognized as a food type may result in the user being presented with photo filters that let the user view information e.g., calories, fat content, cost, or other information associated with the food type.”
Besides giving contextual information, this process may also make businesses able to provide promotions and discounts based on images’ content. For instance, in the patent image below, a person who has taken the Snap of a coffee cup is being provided a discount coupon based on the image of that snap.
These updates are a new step in that direction, as they set the scene for the next level of AR development as well, where users may be able to create similar scans with their AR-enabled glasses.
Snapchat would like to develop its product to be a complete functional AR device, yet with Facebook in the race to create their own AR glasses to the market, it may be a difficult requirement of snapchat to achieve. However, probably, if Snapchat could establish more visual elements as these, it can become a great partner for a different company that is developing AR glasses as well.
Like, say, Apple?
The tech developments asked might make it very hard for Snapchat to establish its own AR glasses alone. However, the tools may end up a perfect addition for a potential partnership between Snapchat and Apple, which may still have a version of Spectacles that becomes AR-enabled in time to be competitors with Facebook’s device.
That is the next level for this technology. So, as this is a practical addition at the time, that it may be far from important technology moving forward.
