You are here: Home / Tech / Amazon’s ‘Flow’ iPhone app: Augmented reality for products

Amazon’s ‘Flow’ iPhone app: Augmented reality for products

by 4 Comments

Amazon.com’s A9 search subsidiary surfaced today with a new iPhone app, Flow Powered by Amazon, that lets users hold their phone up to a product and see information such as pricing, availability, reviews and media content on top of the live image.

The company describes the free app as an augmented reality experience. I’ve been trying it out on my phone, and if you’re familiar with the music recognition app Shazam, think of it like that but for physical products, working either by barcodes or image recognition. Little blue dots swarm the product on the phone’s screen to indicate that it’s trying to figure out what the object is.

Amazon says it works with books, DVDs, CDs, video games, and millions of other packaged items.

Here’s a link to the download page in the iOS App Store.

No word on an Android app, but it’s hard to imagine Amazon not working on one, given the company’s investment in its Android App Store and the upcoming release of its Android-based Kindle Fire.

  • http://twitter.com/richphoto Richard Brown Photog

    Ha! maybe if you lived somewhere that you had no access to buy many things you need but look at the Nutella shipping cost. I hope thats just a made up graphic.

  • http://www.hokstad.com/blog vidarh

    The Amazon Android apps already supports doing this for barcodes. At least the “Amazon UK” Android app does. Tap search and you get a “scan a barcode” option. Not as slick as overlaying it on the camera image and using image recognition perhaps, but functional enough that I’ve many times bought stuff of Amazon instead of whatever store I was in when I checked the price..

  • Greg

    Not sure just putting an info box on top of the image from the camera counts as augmented reality.  Usually, the augmentation needs to be integrated into the image in a way that seems natural, like it was there in the scene, not just plopped on top of the camera image.

    • Guest

      In reality, I’ve been to lowbrow stores that put an infobox on top of every item, indicating its name (as if that weren’t evident from the item itself) and its price. Amazon is simply superimposing its own price box atop the stores’.