Beyond the image

May 3, 2011 by pmelcher.

Up to now, images would only give you remote information in a passive way. More than often, they illustrate an accompanying article, with no more duty than to confirm what you are reading. As much as the photographer or publisher tried, it was a view and forget operation. No so anymore.

Thanks to new technology, the image has grown to becoming more intelligent, by permitting its viewers to dig deeper into it’s content. It is also now able to call home and inform on how it is being interpreted.

Thanks to a company called Stipple, photographs acquire a new dimension, an interactive layer, that finally allows viewers to communicate with them. Thanks to a mouse over generated interactive layer, small dots appear on specific parts of the images. Those dots, once selected, present the user with numerous options. They can save, share or shop for some of the items. They can also be presented with live feeds of tweets or links to additional information .

Viewers can then interact with this new set of information in ways never seen before. They can purchase the items that they like, search for local deals or even better, be presented with discounts. Last but not least, both publishers and the photography rights owners can see, in real time, how people interact with their images.

Stipple works with all images : sports, travel, celebrity, news, commercial stock. There are no limitations.

Not only Stipple adds intelligent interaction to photographs in a smart non intrusive manner, but it also engages viewers to explore photographs in innovative ways. Beyond the frustrating limitations of the IPTC caption field that can only give an overview of the content of an image, Stipple dots can easily display extremely precise information on specific areas within a photograph.

One might think that this would be hard to implement : not at all. Photo agencies need nothing else to do then send a parallel feed of their images the same way they already do to their clients, while publishers only need to add a simple javascript code. That’s it. No added workload. And it’s free.

To top it all, both publishers and photo agencies receive a commission on all transaction generated by their images. In a depressed market, this is very welcomed news.

Finally, Stipple offers a great tool against orphan work. If the metadata of an image is stripped, Stipple will automatically reunite it with rightful owner and display the original information. Even if the image has been altered.

Using some powerful technology built in house, Stipple is the first company to fully offer an intelligent image solution to both publishers and photo agencies along with a new inventive way to generate more revenue.

You can get more information on Stipple on their website at www.stippleit.com

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