I love bookshops. The old kind are the best. Packed with books in every available nook. Floor to ceiling stacks of all the genres you could imagine. I can lose hours browsing the shelves.
Sometimes I don’t have the time to spare though. I just want to pop in and pick up something quickly, but finding a particular book can be challenging. Yes, there are various ways of organising books to help people find what they’re looking for, but things get move around. It’s tricky to scan the text on spines given that it’s sideways.
It occurred to me that this would be an interesting use of Augment Reality (AR) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Just scan your phone along the stacks and an app can highlight the book you’re looking for. Computers can almost definitely find the book quicker than a human could. Besides Apple provides all the APIs needed to identify things shaped like books, read the text from the spines, and highlight the correct book in 3D space using AR.
I played around with what the UI for an app like this could look like. Who knows if I’ll ever build it, but it was a fun experiment.
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