Pinterest Takes Cue From ‘The Big Bang Theory’ With Shopping App

In the popular TV series “The Big Bang Theory,” there was an episode called “The Bus Pants Utilization” where the show’s lead female character “Penny” proposes a mobile app that could help women find shoes online by simply taking a picture of them. As is often the case with reality taking a cue from fiction, Pinterest has just unveiled plans to release an app that does exactly what “Penny” wanted and more. With the app, people can just snap a photo of the item in question and the social network’s “camera search” tool will find the item for the user.

Pinterest made the announcement at its San Francisco, CA headquarters, according to Forbes, where President Tim Kendall talked about what the app will offer.

“‘Camera search,’ which will be available to users within the coming months, will let pinners take a photo of an object in the real world, like a pair of shoes they see on the subway and find that item and similar products on Pinterest,” Kendall said. “The company is also making automatic object detection possible through ’visual search’ on iOS, in which people use photos as search queries.”

This is an example of the capabilities derived from machine learning, where programs can start exhibiting human-like abilities in terms of speech recognition and object detection, PC Mag explains. In the case of “Camera Search” by Pinterest, every object within the photo will be given its own particular recognition pin, which will then allow the app to find all items related to the objects that were pinned.

Fortunately, users won’t have to worry about being overloaded with information because of so many pinned images since they can just pick and choose which object they want to be searched by the app. The engineers behind the project are so proud of their achievement that they compare the pinning speed of the objects to that of Google’s search box autofill, which is often instantaneous.