Collect things, not photos with Microsoft's experimental Thinga.Me project

Shawn Knight

Posts: 15,256   +192
Staff member

Microsoft’s experimental Garage lab has created a new project that’s perhaps best described as Pinterest for the real world. Rather than collect Internet pictures and links, Thinga.Me encourages users to digitize and share their personal collections of possessions with friends and other users.

Say, for example, you have a collection of model cars. Using Thinga.Me, you can photograph each car and add them to a digital collection complete with a descriptive tag. The app uses image segmentation technology which means it can “cut out” the background so you’re left with only an image of the collectible in question, making it easier and more aesthetically pleasing to add to a digital collection. Items can then be pasted into collections using the theme and layout of your choosing.

Microsoft said it developed Thinga.Me to help them understand how people may like to digitize and share their personal collections. It anticipates the app being useful to serious collectors that want to share their items online with like-minded people, parents that may want to scan their kid’s artwork to archive and share with friends and family and even people that may simply want to archive items tucked away in storage.

Thinga.Me is currently in a closed trial meaning if you’re interested, you’ll need to sign up to get accepted into the program. What’s more, it’s only available for iOS devices at the moment although I suspect it’ll expand to include Android at a later date (assuming of course that the project makes it out of the test phase).

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