A new and exciting features for those who read comics in Google Play Books has begun rolling out to users. The new Bubble Zoom feature is designed to make reading the speech bubbles in a comic book much easier by automatically zooming in on those bubbles as you view the comic page.
Using the same technology to recognize objects in photos, we trained our system to identify speech bubbles in comics. Bubble zoom expands the speech bubbles of a comic one-tap-at-a-time, making them super easy to read on your mobile device. It’s much easier to read digital comics one-handed as Bubble Zoom automatically identifies and expands each speech bubble for readability. No more compromising the full-page experience or getting lost while panning around.
The feature was announced last week at the San Diego Comic-Con as Google continues to push to be a leading comic book platform for readers.
Right now the availability of the new Bubble Zoom feature is pretty limited. Only a few comics have been
Bubble Zoom in Google Play Books
learned by the system to support the new feature but Google plans to have their machine learning processes learn all of the comics ever made to support it for them in Google Play Books. That could take some time but it is very likely that it will just start showing up in comics that you already own over time.
I admit that I am not much of a comic reader (never did in the old school paper world either) but this new feature does solve one of my biggest complaints about trying to read them on a mobile phone. You have to zoom in and pan around which doesn’t make for the greatest experience. And I get lost on the page. This new feature should definitely help that issue and make reading a coming on a phone a much more enjoyable experience.
