BENGALURU: Ricoh Innovations Corporation (RIC), a Silicon Valley-based subsidiary of Ricoh Company, has launched Ocutag mobile visual search platform. Ocutag is the first product from its newly formed Visual Services and Solutions Business Unit.

“Mobile search will be a US$ 15 billion by 2017. How much of this will be through visual search is difficult to predict at present. The mission for our new Visual Services and Solutions Business Unit is to understand and interpret the world’s visual information to provide an enhanced human experience. High-performance, large-scale mobile visual search plays an important role in realizing that mission,” stated Ricoh Innovations president and CEO Dr. Nikhil Balram.

The first implementation for this technology has been done with Disney UTV Digital’s new smartphone app in India says RIC. The augmented reality feature called Snap Search connects users to their favorite Bollywood stars and allows them to click a snap of a movie poster to provide easy access to customized content like movie trailers, behind the scenes videos, Tweets, pictures and more.

RIC plans to leverage the shift in consumer entertainment consumption and cumbersomeness that one experiences using a mobile phone virtual keyboard and the limited usability of mobile voice interactivity. It says that its platform can be used to create applications by branders and marketers for smart as well as feature phones and is operating system agnostic. UTV created apps for Windows, iOS and Android phones.