![]() Dream Arcades Brings Google AI to Retro Gaming With New Cartridge ID AppDream Arcades, a leader in retro gaming technology, for the last two years has quietly been working to enable Google AI to assist gamers with cataloging and managing their video game cartridges by creating the Cartridge Analysis & Recognition Tool, or CART app.
By: Dream Arcades "When we first started this project, we thought we'd have to use Optical Character Recognition to read titles and serial numbers from cartridges," His team has been collecting images for nearly two years from a small army of volunteers as well as websites such as eBay. For its part, Google has over a million cartridge images it can analyze to help identify thousands of different games. Currently, the CART app is limited to Dream Arcade's customers and volunteers, but as the number of systems it can recognize improves Dream Arcades expects to roll it out to a larger audience—along with new features such as sharing game catalogs, recommending games you might enjoy, or even identifying rare or prototype cartridges. "AI has recently been in the news for its ability to beat world-class gamers. But we wanted to find a way to leverage AI to actually help gamers," says Michael. The system is already expanding beyond its original objective by learning to identify damaged cartridges, as well as game variants. The project's ultimate goal is to give the average gamer the same ability as the most experienced collector when it comes to finding rare or valuable video games. The most expensive game cartridges can be worth over a hundred thousand dollars—soon Dream Arcade's CART app might just tell you if you've got a hidden treasure. End
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