Challenge
Pokémon card collectors had no easy way to digitise their physical collections. Manually cataloguing hundreds of cards — finding market values, tracking prices, managing wishlists — was tedious and time-consuming. The product also needed to support both English and Japanese cards, which added significant OCR complexity to the recognition problem.
Pokémon card collectors had no easy way to digitise their physical collections. Manually cataloguing hundreds of cards — finding market values, tracking prices, managing wishlists — was tedious and time-consuming. The product also needed to support both English and Japanese cards, which added significant OCR complexity to the recognition problem.
Solution
We built a mobile-first web app where users point their phone camera at any Pokémon card and the app identifies it instantly using Google Cloud Vision OCR combined with OpenAI. Identified cards are automatically added to a digital collection with live market pricing. Features include collection management, a wishlist, price tracking, and Google authentication for seamless onboarding.
We built a mobile-first web app where users point their phone camera at any Pokémon card and the app identifies it instantly using Google Cloud Vision OCR combined with OpenAI. Identified cards are automatically added to a digital collection with live market pricing. Features include collection management, a wishlist, price tracking, and Google authentication for seamless onboarding.
Results
The app reliably scans both English and Japanese cards — the hardest part of the OCR problem — and fetches live market value automatically the moment a card is recognised. Collectors get collection management, a wishlist, and price tracking together in one platform, with Google authentication for frictionless sign-up. The result is a working consumer product that turns a tedious manual task into a few seconds of scanning.
The app reliably scans both English and Japanese cards — the hardest part of the OCR problem — and fetches live market value automatically the moment a card is recognised. Collectors get collection management, a wishlist, and price tracking together in one platform, with Google authentication for frictionless sign-up. The result is a working consumer product that turns a tedious manual task into a few seconds of scanning.