[Kris Kumar]

Originally Posted by crcastle

Similar idea created by a Seattle-based company, but more personal. Check out the short video demo on the homepage:

http://smartpox.aa-rflabs.com/

Thanks for sharing the link. Pretty cool. And I like how it is being marketed.

But I will stick with my proprietary sob story. I have been looking for technology to make the existing system easy to use. If I am in a book store and like a book, I don't have to now write down the name thanks to AURA. If I want to do product research, I can do that quickly. I do not have to wait for smartCode or smartPox to show up on the products. I can do it today with the barcodes.

[Kris Kumar]

Originally Posted by crcastle

Similar idea created by a Seattle-based company, but more personal. Check out the short video demo on the homepage:

http://smartpox.aa-rflabs.com/

Thanks for sharing the link. Pretty cool. And I like how it is being marketed.

But I will stick with my proprietary sob story. I have been looking for technology to make the existing system easy to use. If I am in a book store and like a book, I don't have to now write down the name thanks to AURA. If I want to do product research, I can do that quickly. I do not have to wait for smartCode or smartPox to show up on the products. I can do it today with the barcodes.

[njb42]

It's funny, I've been wishing for something like this for years now. See a product in Best Buy, not sure if it's really a good price, that kind of thing. I couldn't believe it had never been done.

I started writing an app in C# to do this with amazon.com web services. It actually turned out not to be too hard. I got it working but ran into the same problem with the camera lens.

[Kris Kumar]

Originally Posted by njb42

I got it working but ran into the same problem with the camera lens.

Wow, you worked on the image recognition, I mean to read the barcode from an image. Cool!

You should keep working. It is just a matter of time, the lens on the camera phones will improve. ;-)

Also Aura client can be re-wired to use your Web services code instead of theirs. You should check out the FAQ.

[njb42]

Originally Posted by Kris Kumar

Wow, you worked on the image recognition, I mean to read the barcode from an image. Cool!

All I needed to do was find a third-party library that could OCR a barcode and which would run on the .NET Compact Framework. Once I found that, I wrote the code to take a picture, feed it through the OCR, and send the UPC off to Amazon Web Services for retrieval. Pretty simple, really. I don't think I put more than 3 or 4 hours' work into it.

I was going to release the source code on xda-developers, but I got distracted with work, and I still had problems with the lens. I got around this for testing purposes by blowing up barcodes on my laptop screen and shooting those.

[edraven]

Originally Posted by Kris Kumar

AURA stands for Advanced User Resource Annotation. Behind the fancy name is an amazing technology that enables the Windows Mobile devices to read product barcodes and pull up product information. This software is one of the many useful concepts being demonstrated and tested by Microsoft Research.

Every link to AURA now returns this:

Microsoft Research AURA project and all AURA services have terminated as of June 30, 2007. The Microsoft Research Community Technologies Team thanks you for your interest in this research project, and hopes that it has been a valuable resource. Please feel free to contact us with any questions or feedback.

Does anyone still have the .cab to install AURA?

[developerzero]

Originally Posted by njb42

All I needed to do was find a third-party library that could OCR a barcode and which would run on the .NET Compact Framework. Once I found that, I wrote the code to take a picture, feed it through the OCR, and send the UPC off to Amazon Web Services for retrieval. Pretty simple, really. I don't think I put more than 3 or 4 hours' work into it.

I was going to release the source code on xda-developers, but I got distracted with work, and I still had problems with the lens. I got around this for testing purposes by blowing up barcodes on my laptop screen and shooting those.

Several Questions:
1) Could you post a link when you get this up?
2) What library(s) did you use?
3) Since the AURA sight is down now, anyone know where I could get one of those lens things? Anyone not want theirs?

Note: I'm sending a message to the AURA groups e-mail address to see if I can find out more.