Integrate card.io With Web Based App [closed]

Question

Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.

---

Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.

Closed last year.

Improve this question

We prefer to use web based apps with jquery.mobile as they can get upgraded on demand and just less hassle. Is there an api that can be called by ajax from our web based app to use the card.io service?

Answer 1

I'm afraid not. To make for a responsive, reliable user experience, card.io actually examines many video frames to select good quality ones for processing. We also process them client-side, because with large images the latency from the network round trip can be significant.

This all requires non-trivial client-side work. There are two immediate problems to porting to html: (1) performance and (2) camera APIs.

Performance

Javascript interpreters are fast, but when doing image processing, native code is a huge help. (card.io uses the GPU, the ARM vector co-processor, and drops down to assembly in a few places.) Access to the GPU via Canvas will help, but not all algorithms are amenable to GPU treatment. Performance will continue to become less critical over time, but it's a major challenge right now.

Camera APIs

Camera API support is very uneven across mobile browsers, and (to my knowledge, at time of writing), none of the major mobile browsers (Mobile Safari, Chrome, Firefox) provide full realtime video access with enough control over resolution to make processing the stream feasible. Again, hopefully this will change.

I hold out hope that there will someday be a mobile web version of card.io, but it's definitely not available now (although we do have a Phone Gap plugin.)