We believe that the future of mobile search is visual – using the camera in your mobile device to to get information about any object or landmark in your vicinity with no typing necessary. Not only will we recognize things via the camera, we’ll be doing it in realtime and overlaying results in augmented reality fashion. We launched our first mobile visual search application, RedLaser, about a month ago.

Today we’re excited to announce that we’ve released RedLaser 2.0, which lets you scan barcodes in realtime. This means you don’t have to take a photo, just hold it over a barcode and we scan it from the video feed. It’s available on the App Store, and we’ve cut the price temporarily to $0.99.

Here is RedLaser 2.0 in action:

Currently the realtime mode only works on UPC barcodes (which is most barcodes in the US), but we’ll be adding EAN (books/European barcodes) support soon. We’ll also be releasing a new version of our SDK that gives developers access to the new mode.

Barcodes are just the beginning, look for more mobile visual search technology from Occipital soon.