Measure Mate

Ever wondered how far away that mountain is from you, or that building, or what the distance is between you and that tree, or that car in front of you? With Measure Mate, your speculations need no longer lead you astray. This new idea, based on a new product, takes the form of an app for future smart phones with 3D cameras. It’s only a matter of time before smart phones are equipped with 3D camera (2 lenses) functionality and that’s when this new app idea gains credence. Measure Mate is a distance measuring app, based on triangulation calculations, rather than echo or laser techniques. Triangulation means calculating all the sides and angles in a network of triangles based on the length of at least one side of a triangle. Therefore, the precise measurement of the length of a single baseline can determine the scale of an entire triangulation network. In other words, if you take a picture of a tree with 2 cameras placed exactly 5 cm apart (or any other distance), you can calculate the exact distance to the tree in the pictures. Triangulation is not a new technique, astronomers have been using it for years to calculate distances to stellar objects (see parallax), and neither is stereoscopic imaging for creating the illusion of depth in 2D images a new idea (see stereoscopy). But Measure Mate is. Once smart phones include 3D cameras, the exact length of the first side of the triangle becomes a constant. 

 

This is how it works:

1. You take a picture with Measure Mate (which is really two pictures: one from each lens).
2. Measure Mate superimposes the images one atop the other to create a new picture.
3. You select an object to which you want to know the distance in the new picture.
4. Measure Mate triangulates the distance to the object based on the distance between the two lenses.

You can read more about the necessary calculations here.

Measure Mate should be extremely cheap and easy to program – all the formulas already exist and all the technological concepts already exists. The most expensive budget item would probably be copyright protection for the app. I also think the potential market for Measure Mate is virtually limitless, from civilian to military markets, who wouldn’t pay just a few dollars for this piece of product innovation? Or forget about selling it, make it a free app and capitalize from advertising.

Who's That App

This is a new idea for a smartphone application and is based on some already existing technologies for searching the web with pictures rather than keywords. Who’s That App would enable you to take a picture of someone you know or want to know better with your smartphone and would search the web for any matches based on face recognition software. Imagine being at a bar and falling head over heels for someone. You could either approach him or her and try get a phone number or email address or you could ask around if anyone you know knows that person. Who’s That App would provide another option - take a picture of the person and get to know him or her a little better through a Facebook page or anywhere else that person’s picture appears. Who’s That App would enable you to be more informed about the person you wish to approach. Dating and matchmaking services aside, Who’s That App is definitely something I’d like to have on my phone, simply because I hate seeing people in the street that I recognize and should remember their names but never do… Who’s That App would appeal to a very wide target audience and shouldn’t be all that expensive to develop considering the fact that it’s based on already existing picture search engines and facial recognition software. It should just be a matter of knitting them together – which is the new idea here – and developing an easy-to-use yet awesome graphic user interface.

Snapper

Wouldn't it be great if when you're snapping pics on holiday, someone you care about could see them as you snap them from half the world away? Well, I tend to think so. Snapper would be some sort of BlueTooth enabled USB dongle that you could plug into your digital camera and would enable you to transmit pictures taken to your 3G phone. A simple application could then forward the received picture to anywhere you want (email, SMS, Facebook). I envisage it as a two-step procedure:

1) Plug in the Snapper dongle to your camera.

2) Take a picture.

When you plug in the Snapper dongle, your preconfigured Bluetooth device (phone) is recognized and ready to send any picture received to a preconfigured location. Then when you take the picture, it is automatically sent to wherever you wanted it to go. That is, assuming there is 3G network coverage when you take the picture.

Snapper could also work with a Wi-Fi dongle enabling you to send pictures through your home network to local storage or the Internet. This would alleviate the need for the phone acting as a middle man but is much more limited for there are fewer places with public Wi-Fi than with 3G network coverage. Snapper could also eliminate the need for large and costly memory cards by sending all pictures taken on your camera to be stored externally and not on the camera's memory card. I think that Snapper could be produced fairly easily for it relies on already existing technologies – it just blends them together for new purposes. For this reason, Snapper could be marketed at under $100 and I know I'd pay that much for it.

Snapper would be especially useful for whenever you go out with your camera, be it for a holiday or a trip to the zoo with the kids, but also for the more specialized market of reporters and professional photographers (to whom you could offer Snapper with data encryption). Also, if you take many pictures at home and you're lazy like me – simply can't be bothered transferring the pictures to my computer – Snapper would be perfect for you!