Many developers are familiar with Catchoom’s native mobile CraftAR SDKs. These SDKs allow you to integrate our Image Recognition and Augmented Reality services into your iOS and Android applications.
But what happens to those who are interested in developing web apps? Good news: we offer a Cloud Image Recognition Javascript library as well. You can use this library to integrate our Image Recognition technology into your web and hybrid apps that run on the latest desktop Internet browsers as well as on Android and iOS devices.
Image Recognition in web & hybrid apps versus in native mobile apps
There has been much debate in the industry whether users preferred native mobile apps, mobile sites or hybrid apps.
We at Catchoom are proud supporters of native mobile application development and we put great emphasis on providing native mobile SDKs that make it easy for developers to create apps with Image Recognition and Augmented Reality.
However, we do believe that web and hybrid apps also have some advantages, such as being able to offer a universal user experience across devices, and being able to add useful features to an existing website instead of starting an app from scratch.
That’s why want to give developers a choice between going for native mobile development, or developing web and hybrid apps with our Javascript library and tools such as our Cordova Plugins for Image Recognition and Augmented Reality.
And in all those cases, you can still enjoy the same high speed and accuracy of our core cloud Image Recognition technology, providing outstanding performance on a many types of objects and in suboptimal conditions such as occlusion and difficult angles.
Example: enabling Cloud Image Recognition through scanning feature in mobile website
Take the example of Uvinum. Uvinum won the international title of “best online wine marketplace” in 2016, and with more than 90,000 products sold in 14 countries, they claim to be the biggest online wine store in Europe.
As an innovative component of their customer experience, they integrated a ‘visual search’ feature in their mobile website to help people discover and buy beverages by scanning a product they like, using their phones in a store or bar.
Uvinum.co.uk viewed on desktop, the scanning feature is not active.
(Actually, the feature could have been made available on desktop, too, as Catchoom's Javascript library
also enables Cloud Image Recognition in websites and web apps by accessing a webcam.)
Whenever it is detected that the user accesses the site on a mobile device, the scanning feature becomes active, indicated with a camera icon next to the search bar.
With scanning activated, all the user needs to do is to point their phone’s camera at the label of a bottle and take a picture (camera capture mode) or upload a photo from the phone’s library (image selector mode).
With the Cloud Image Recognition Javascript running in the back, the website recognizes the label and looks for a matching item in Uvinum’s inventory.
The user is then led to a product page where she can learn more about the product, or see alternatives.
Our Javascript Library now supports the latest Javascript frameworks and module bundlers
We’ve just made some improvements in our Javascript library, so that it now supports being imported in modern Javascript module systems (CommonJS, AMD, ES2015 and ES2016) like those used by RequireJS and Webpack.
This will help developers import our library when using the latest Javascript frameworks and module bundlers.
Start building apps with Image Recognition: download and try the Javascript library
Go to the Documentation of our Javascript library to read more about the specifications and request the Javascript library.
The library supports Catchoom's CraftAR Cloud Image Recognition service, which you can try for free, including 1000 cloud scans.
