Out shopping and facing color dilemmas? HP to the rescue
Tired of exhorting your girlfriends to accompany you on a shopping binge? Friends, who needs them anyways? Except, of course, for that final decisive moment when you choose Marshmellow over Pinky Beige. Unpack at home and bingo...the realization - Pinky Beige was better. HP seeks to end our dependence on our buddies once and for all.
Coming from the house of HP labs is a revolutionary new service that'll use mobile phones to determine exactly which color one should choose. So any dilemmas while deciding a perfect color to match your skin tone would be a thing of the past.
New color matching technology
The research arm of HP, HP labs yesterday flaunted a prototype of its research project that uses sophisticated imaging algorithms and mobile networking to transform our camera phones into shopping advisors. Tagged 'Color Match,' the mobile service will aim at helping consumers make the right choice when it comes to making color-conscious decisions.
Prototype
HP's dedicated research staff has prepared a prototype to flaunt its latest innovation. The prototype is more specifically aimed at helping women and men (read metrosexuals) to find the best shade of makeup to suit their skin tones. Why makeup and not sweaters? Ask Nina Bhatti, principal scientist at HP Labs and she puts it stark naked:
Studies have shown that up to 75 percent of women are wearing the wrong shade of makeup.
Those are some serious stats. Nina adds that the reason why the prototype is specifically aimed at selecting makeup is because most of the ladies buy cosmetics from drugstores and increasingly, web, which offers them virtually no chance to test as compared to somewhere like a cosmetics store.
How it works?
Instead of asking for salesman's expert advice (?) pose for pics along with whatever the counter offers you for making the choice viz. color charts. Cheese, and with the photographs done away with, send 'em via MMS to HPs server. The backend computer system will locate consumer's face within the image and correct the image to eliminate the effects of poor lighting and/or camera quality.
Then the face detection software finds your pretty face in the image, extracts skin pixels and determines the predominant color. By comparing these skin pixels with a database of different faces already stored on the server, the system magically pronounces correct choice for the eager consumer. The results are relayed back to the consumer on her cell phone via a text message, recommendations and all.
Viability
Nina Bhatti says:
It (mobile color matching) takes expertise in imaging, backend processing and mobility to make this work, all of which we have here. This is one of those things that really only HP is equipped to do on a truly commercial scale.
Such a technology could have diverse practical applications. As already illustrated, it could be a face-saver (literally) while buying makeup. Deciding on wall paints or color of the furniture could be another area where mobile matching has potential applications. Consumers will reap the benefits in the form of more logical choices (after all, you can't get more logical than 0's and 1's) and a saving of shopping-time, which, if I may add, is not necessarily a good thing for ladies.
HP doesn't have a deadline by which it is looking to commercialize this application, but it is in talks with some cosmetics' manufacturers. My suggestion, till then keep your girlfriends right in your corner.
