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Spector Is A Handheld Tool That Can Detect Fonts And Colors In Real World Objects

By Ershad Kaleebullah
Published on: 13:22 PST, Jul 5, 2016

Have you ever walked down the street, looked at a tree, a car, or a signboard, and wondered – what shade of green is the leaf or what is the font typeface used by the signboard? Well, if you have (like me), Spector is the perfect tool for you. Spector is a physical, handheld device that can actually reveal the typeface and colors from physical objects in the world. The next time you want to use the font used in your copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for a project, all you have to do is reach for the Spector near you. Spector offers great utility but it is not ready for mass market retail yet.

Spector is a prototype created by Fiona O’Leary for her graduation project at Royal College of Art. It captures fonts and colors in the real world, identifies them, and transfers them directly to Adobe InDesign for use. While Spector is currently only a working prototype, Wired reports that Fiona is interested in commercializing Spector but is in no rush to do so. It could become one of the very few mass market digital tools that bridges the gap between the physical and digital world.

Talking to the Wired, Fiona describes that her idea for Spector germinated out of pure frustration. She says, “When you design for print on screen, it never looks like how it’s going to print. If you’re going to design for print on screen you should start with print.”

Spector from Fiona O’Leary on Vimeo.

If you are wondering how Spector — or the “interactive eye-dropping tool” as Fiona puts it — actually works, you can depress the button on top of the tool, which acts as a shutter for the 5-megapixel camera inside it. This camera then captures an image of the physical world. An algorithm inside Spector then reads information about the shape of the font or the CMYK/RGB color values and checks it with a font/color database. In fact, if you are hooked to a computer while capturing the information using Spector then it immediately relays the font typeface or color hex code to InDesign directly. Using the custom plugin for Spector, InDesign automatically changes the font of the highlighted text. Pretty nifty, right?

What’s more? If you don’t have a computer nearby, you can use the in-built storage capacity to capture up to 20 typefaces, which you can then transfer to any computer. For the design geeks out there, the Spector can identify only up to seven typefaces at the moment. Fiona hopes to integrate Spector with a bigger database in the future. Apart from just recognizing the typeface of a particular font, Spector can also identify type size (up to 48pts), kerning, and leading.

One of the major drawbacks of Spector is surprisingly a big one – typeface piracy – which is actually a big deal in the designing community. Designers could potentially use Spector to identify and use most fonts (provided they are in the database), including the paid ones, leading to typeface piracy. However, this minor niggle can be averted by merely removing paid fonts from the database.

MIMO from Fiona O’Leary on Vimeo.

Apart from Spector, Fiona has also worked on another really cool physical tool called MIMO. This tool can be used to copy-paste four items — it could be anything from images to text to links to articles — at the same time and save it to the device. Essentially, you can use this tool to copy stuff to four different clipboards. This could be a great tool for students working on their research projects or even professionals who work on massive documentation. MIMO is also a prototype currently.

[Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]

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