Microsoft’s Thinga.Me App Digitizes Your Real-World Knickknacks

Microsoft’s Thinga.Me App Digitizes Your Real-World Knickknacks
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Thinga.Me is Microsoft’s take on Pinterest, allowing you to easily organize your assorted trinkets and baubles into a shareable digital scrapbook. Especially if you collect coins, baseball cards, or Star Wars memorabilia, this app (which only works on iPhone) provides a nifty new way to archive the fruits of your obsession online.

While people have already taken to taking photos of objects and sharing them on social media, what sets Thinga.Me apart is that it uses machine vision to identify the object and cut it out of the background, which you can then organize into collections in a scrapbook based on whatever theme you choose.

The cut-and-paste and corkboard aesthetic gives Thinga.Me the whimsical feel of an elementary school project. If you’re a fanatical stamp-collector, the app could prove to be a useful and fun way to feed your addiction. Others who don’t feel the urge to collect may find the whole thing a little gimmicky and pointless.

Developed by Garage, Microsoft’s experimental project arm, Thinga.Me is an indication that the company is leaning on machine vision to differentiate it from the host of other scrapbooking and collecting apps that are part of the iOS catalogue.

Other tech companies, such as Snapchat, Google, and Facebook have also turned to machine learning in order to bridge the cyber-physical gap and allow their apps to interact with real-world objects.

Thinga.Me is not available for wide consumption and is currently in closed trials. You can sign up for beta testing on Thinga.Me’s website and if you’re lucky, you may be able to try out an early release.

Featured Photo Engadget

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