Qualcomm announced at CES that its wholly owned subsidiaries, Qualcomm Technologies and Qualcomm Austria Research Center GmbH, will enhance the Qualcomm Vuforia software platform to support real-time text recognition using smartphone and tablet cameras. When released in the spring, Vuforia’s text-recognition capability will allow developers to build a new class of educational experiences that incorporate interactivity with real-world objects. Additionally, developers can use Vuforia’s text recognition to enable a new form of data entry in addition to on-screen keyboards and speech-to-text.
As an example of this capability, Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization behind “Sesame Street,” has unveiled its Big Bird’s Words application as the first app built using the Vuforia text-recognition feature. In the Big Bird’s Words app, children are guided to search for and find new words in their environment, and building vocabulary. Big Bird’s ‘wordoscope’ will enable children to use a smartphone or tablet camera as a digital eye into their real-world environments to find and identify words, bringing a deeper understanding of what these words mean by exposing children to them in familiar contexts.
“Qualcomm Technologies is thrilled to collaborate with Sesame Workshop to create experiences that are both fun and educational for children,” said Jay Wright, vice president of business development for Qualcomm Technologies. “By enabling apps to ‘read’ using the Vuforia platform, we believe a whole new generation of educational experiences will now be possible.”
