One of the most popular use cases for visual recognition and augmented reality are interactive print applications. Using a mobile app to “scan” a page in a printed newspaper or magazine opens access to digital options such as additional links, archiving, social media sharing etc.

The Shortcut app of our sister company Shortcut Media is just one example of such an app. A similar use case are interactive print catalogues, that link the physical catalogue with mobile shopping options.

In contrast to QR codes, if there is a publication with many pages, making the whole issue interactive just becomes a matter of adding pages to the recognition system, and adding additional content to the pages.

But how to you get the pages into the system really quickly? We wrote a little Ruby script for you, which does just that in a few lines of code. What it does:

• split a PDF file into pages
• convert each page to an image
• upload it to kooaba
• store thumbnails and the original PDF of the page to s3

The code can be found on github. We are looking forward to many new interactive print apps.

And btw, if you need a mobile app, check out our iOS tutorial from last week.