Il Tirreno Social |

Tirreno Social is an innovative application of image recognition and mobile technologies targeted to printed newspapers. Visual Engines has made available the framework VeMIR to build an iOS and Android App empowering printed newspaper readers by augmenting the newspaper with digital assets such as online articles updates, videos and discussions on social networks.The partner in this experience is Il Tirreno, an Italian regional newspaper featuring sixteen local editions around Tuscany. It was founded in 1877 under the name Il Telegrafo it is currently part of the Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso.

Try it now!

The “Tirreno Social” App is freely available on App Store and Google Play. Once downloaded and installed on your mobile device it is immediately ready for use. You only need a printed copy of the “Il Tirreno” to scan it and enjoy. To try the app, if you do not live in Tuscany and do not have a printed copy of the newspaper at hand, we suggest you to open the daily front page image of the “Il Tirreno” on your computer and use your phone to scan the image on the screen.

how it works

Newspaper pages images loaded on the VeMIR Recognizer Repository

BEHIND THE SCENE

The VeMIR recognizer need to be instructed to recognize the newspaper pages. Every morning the newspaper editors prepare an archive file with the images of the pages and the reference to linked digital assets. The archive is loaded on the VeMIR repository and properly processed.

TIRRENO SOCIAL APP STARTS

When the user launches the Tirreno Social app it immediately checks if it is updated and, if necessary, download the daily data from the server.

Tirreno Social splash screen

Mobile device is ready to scan the newspaper

Ready to scan

When the device is ready, tapping the “Scan” button will open the video cam and start the scanning process. The app would take fraction of seconds to get an image, check if it knows it (it tries 6 times for each image). If the image is recognized, it jump to the digital asset linked to the recognized part of the newspaper page, otherwise it restart the process.

Found something …

When the app recognizes the newspaper page we are looking at, it immediately stop scanning and load the associated digital content.

Front page was recognized. It is linked to the Facebook account.