Touch opens up a new world in video

For broadcasters and video publishers, this provides a great opportunity to offer additional and differentiated content to viewers.

BANGALORE: The internet is a two-way communication channel. Yet, in internet videos today, you can do no more than pause, rewind or fast forward.

Now, imagine if you could touch something you like in a movie that you are watching — say a dress or a shoe that Katrina Kaif is wearing or the location of a shot — to obtain information about it. And imagine you did not have to disrupt your movie watching to get that info; the points you touch are automatically saved so that you can get back to them once the movie is over.

That's exactly what GBS Bindra's new technology solution does. Bindra was the chief innovation officer & strategy leader at Logica and the MD of Logica India before the UK-based IT firm was acquired by Canada's CGI for $2.6-billion in 2012. He, together with Tripat Preet Singh, a former venture capitalist at NEA-IndoUS Ventures, founded a company called Tagos in Bangalore last year to develop the technology.

It's now in beta and Bindra's nine-member team is working with broadcasters, video publishers and brands to get it to consumers.

"I have not seen anybody in the world having done anything like this before," Bindra told TOI in an exclusive interaction. The challenge was to make the system recognize objects in moving images. "We have used complex computer vision technologies, the way robots are programmed to see. The beauty of the technology is also that we don't tell you where to touch, nor do you have to stop the video to touch anything. You can touch any point on the moving image to be able to get info," Bindra said.

In the demonstrations that we saw, one could touch an actor's outfit, face or footwear, objects in a scene, the background locations. Each touch is saved instantly and bundled together on the side as 'charmlogs'. At any point, one can go back to a charmlog to get more details.

In the demo, the touch on a Katrina Kaif footwear showed that she was wearing a Steve Madden shoe, priced at several thousand rupees. It told us where we could get that exact shoe, and it also showed several options of similar looking shoes priced much lower and available at various ecommerce sites.

A touch on a location showed it to be Rue Mouffetard, one of the oldest and popular streets in Paris. Another on a beach scene was identified as Nice, France. Bindra said he merely has to run the video through his system, which checks with the vast information available on the internet to identify objects, people and places and automatically creates the necessary links. There is almost no manual intervention. "The process takes no more than a few minutes for each video," he said.

For broadcasters and video publishers, this provides a great opportunity to offer additional and differentiated content to viewers, and to extend the engagement even after the video has ended. For brands, it's an opportunity to reach out to consumers at a time when they are most influenced by a product.

For locations that you are impressed by, Tagos will have an option that allows you to combine all of those locations and send them to a travel agency so that they could plan a holiday itinerary for you.

"Ads in the middle of programmes are often huge irritants. Our technology now enables non-intrusive but highly relevant pull-based advertising," Bindra said.