SocialCamera, being released for Android Wednesday, is a camera application that recognizes faces and tags friends in photos. Users can then easily share the photo with a tagged friend via MMS or email or post it to Facebook and Flickr with associated people tags attached.
"We want to take the tagging out of sharing photos and make it as automatic as possible," says Jason Mitura,Viewdle's chief product officer.
SocialCamera users will need to create "faceprints" -- for example, teach the application that a particular face is your friend Joe -- for friends in photos. Once a face has been tagged, the faceprint is saved and the app user will no longer need to tag that friend again. Eventually, faceprints will be able to be carried over to future Viewdle applications or shared with friends, which should eliminate redundant tagging.
The SocialCamera application is only for photos. Mitura, however, says that the startup already has the same tagging features for video capture working, so users can expect video support to be included in a future release.
"SocialCamera is the first in a series of applications that leverage true computer vision to build new social experiences and gaming experiences," Mitura says.
Lest you confuse Viewdle as just another facial recognition company -- an easy mistake considering SocialCamera's faceprint features -- Mitura describes the company as working on "computer vision-powered augmented reality."
"The first object that we're doing is faces," he says, "but we're not limited to just doing faces."
Viewdle's technology is capable of identifying any object as seen through a computer or mobile lens, so long as it builds accompanying object detectors and recognizers, Mitura says. The company will be adding edge detection and plane detection to its SDK, for instance. The technology would enable users to rotate and augment real-world objects.