Growing up, we all enjoyed reading comics, be it Spiderman series or the Justice League. Most people will remember saving every penny of their allowance, to buy that next comic of your favorite series or featuring your favorite superhero. Once read, those comics use to go into our collections, the same collection a lot of you end up losing. As some got lost in moves, or sent to the dump by mistake, when you were away in college.
No matter how you lost them, it always hurts a little. Then came the digital age and everything became available on the internet, including your comics, but they were still not with you all the time. This problem was solved with the introduction of smart phones and online reading stores like the Google Play Books app. Now, you can read your books and comic on the go, right in the palm of your hand.
Then you faced a new, but practical problem with reading your favorite comics. The text generally appears quite small on the screen, so you have to pan in and pan out, every time you have to read the text and then view the images. This was not the ideal situation, but the comic lovers were not ready to give up a chance to read their comics, anytime and anywhere.
This issue has now been resolved with the introduction of Bubble Zoom. However, first we should look at where this came from; Google had already introduced a new way of reading comics with its ‘vertical scrolling experience’ on your Tabs and smart phones. In technical terms it is called ‘machine learning’, it is the same technology that allows Google Photos to find particular images with just one word descriptions. Now, this same ‘machine learning’ capacity was used to create the Bubble Zoom.
So, what is this Bubble Zoom?
It is the extension of the same technology that identifies objects in the images, stored in Google Photos. Now, it can also identify the speech bubbles in the digital comics and expand them, so you can read one bubble at a time. This expansion of the speech bubbles will be done on ‘one tap at a time’ basis. In fact, it will make reading comics on your Tabs and smart phones a fun experience, since it identifies the bubbles and expands them one at a time, for easy and single handed readability.
For now, Bubble zoom is available for all DC and Marvel comics collected volumes in the latest Google Play Books app. However, Google is hopeful to make all the other comics and manga available with this new feature, with your help and feedback, of course.
