It's an incredibly cool feature that uses your phone's camera to search for items on the web. While the implementation is undeniably slick, we've struggled to find a situation where we'd actually want to use the feature in the few weeks we've had the Mango Beta on our phone. Well we finally came up with one to put Vision through its paces: a garage sale! What better place to whip out your phone and quickly look up some info on some goods? So to see how Bing Vision fared in our garage sale test, jump past the break.
Upon launching Vision (by tapping on the eye icon in Bing's appbar) you're presented with a text overlay on top of your camera's live feed. The text near the top states, "Scan barcodes, QR Codes, Microsoft Tags, Books, CDs and DVDs." Well it just so happened that this garage sale had all of those things and so we went all out. For those a little muddled on the feature, the way Vision works is extremely simple: open Vision, hold up your phone as though you're taking a photo of an item and then don't touch anything. Bing will automatically focus on the object and begin scanning the web for content. Then if it finds something it will spit back a list of results to choose from over the camera feed.
Like we said, we went all out and scanned a bunch of items. The result? Vision passed with (mostly) flying colors. First we tested out what Vision told us it could do: books, CDs, and DVDs. As you can see in the photos above, we were completely successful scanning an old Linkin Park CD, the Halo: Fall of Reach novel, and a used copy of Underworld on DVD. But then we decided to see if video games would work as well and to our surprise they did. As you can see in the bottom-right photo above, Bing Vision even accurately picked up on the full Guitar Hero 2 with Guitar set when we pointed it at the box. It's clear that Bing Vision can handle a lot of stuff, but we did run into a few hiccups. A more obscure copy of John Steinbeck's Once There Was a War sadly didn't pick up on any results.
However, the bigger takeaway we found from Bing Vision wasn't the core functionality or how accurate it was. Instead we were most impressed by the new Bing 'quick card' feature. All of the results in each image above are all part of Bing's own database, and tapping on the top few results brings up a ton of information about the product. We tested this with the PlayStation One copy of Tekken 3 and were shocked by the truckloads of details the quick card result included.
In the About pivot alone the card showed: the cover art, the average price, a short description, the video game console, the overall rating, the graphics rating, the sound rating, the enjoyment rating, the replay value rating, the documentation rating, the ESRB rating, the genre, the game's style, themes, original release date, the developer, the publisher, control input method, what's included in the package, the UPC, what hardware is supported, languages supported, release country of this copy, tech support contacts, and a basic overview of the game's controls. All of this for a game released 13 years ago on a gaming console that has already seen two successors. Plus many other games, DVDs, CDs also include the same amount of information. Besides the About pivot, there's the Reviews pivot which beams in critiques from users and press, and finally the Prices pivot which shows a collection of well-known online stores (Amazon) as well as more obscure ones (vpgames.com).
In the end, has Bing Vision passed the Garage Sale test? We'd say yes...by a lot. Not only is the scanning procedure easy, fast and simple you're also getting a huge amount of information within seconds. If that's not a killer feature then we don't know what is.
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