Now you can Shazam your beer

So many beers, so little time.

With so many options between the hoppy, the fruity, the wheats, the stouts, the ales, the seasonal pumpkin brews – and boy, can those go either way – and splices you’ve never dreamed of, your next mystery bottle could either be sinfully good or horribly awry. Don’t you wish someone had told you before you opened it?

It’s about time there’s an app for that.

Screenshots of Letsee Beer

Letsee Beer, created by Korean startup Letsee for iOS and Android, uses your smartphone camera to scan the labels and shapes of beer bottles and cans (no draught, though). It brings up the beer’s basic info, plus hashtagged descriptions ranging from #fruity to #damntasty and reviews that other users have left to help you determine whether the brew is worth a try.

The creators hope to do more than build a user-generated database to help beer fans know what they’re drinking before they open the bottle. They’re also utilizing augmented reality technology to bridge the virtual and physical worlds and to nurture a social media network that shows the app’s impact with real users.

“By using the more intuitive AR interface, the users will be able to focus on the user-created content itself instead of getting distracted by cumbersome app interfaces,” Ahn Sangchul, founder and CEO of Letsee, tells Tech in Asia. “People may enjoy sharing their drinking experiences with others using our service, and we hope to encourage them to love beer even more.”

Simple, scalable, fun

Sangchul is a lifelong gamer, a passion that led him to get a PhD in mixed reality system architecture – meaning he basically made Super Mario-like scenarios out of real-life spaces using a smartphone camera as the lens into the game. Instead of going into a big company, he wanted to put his AR tech know-how to use on his own.

Letsee founder and CEO Ahn Sangchul

He started Letsee in July 2014 with big dreams of creating a whole augmented reality-based web content ecosystem, where every physical object under the sun could be scanned and searched on the internet – versus users typing in keywords or uploading an image to match against Google’s vast archive, a process Sangchul believes disconnects them from reality.

“We thought the augmented reality search could provide more natural interactions on the spot,” he says.

But realizing it was a task too mighty for a seedling startup, Sangchul and his team zeroed in on making something small enough that they could handle but a big enough idea to go global. On one hot summer day, they realized beer was the answer.

Sangchul and five of his friends and colleagues from the Korea Institute of Science and Technology hacked a cheap HP scanner and turned it into a hollow, cylindrical device. Then they began the grueling task of 3-D scanning all the bottles of beer they could find, and then drinking them. For science.

Beer is the beginning