Microsoft unveils Thinga.Me, an iPhone app for making virtual collections of your real stuff

Microsoft today showed off the latest creation from Microsoft Garage, its incubator for experimental apps. The Thinga.me app for iPhone will let users take pictures of their collections of physical belongings — like Batman figurines — and then create virtual representations of those collections, which, of course, you can share with others.

The app isn’t available in the App Store yet, but you can request access through a sign-up page.

And you can get a taste for the app’s capabilities on the website. It contains several examples of collections that you can browse, and you can click on individual labeled items in the collections to visit their dedicated pages. You can choose a background for each collection, and the app hides what’s in the background surrounding the object you photograph, so you end up capturing just the item you’re trying to photograph.

The app is a bit reminiscent of Pinterest, which lets users pin photos and other content to boards that they can share. But Pinterest can be used in all sorts of ways, including rounding up photos of things you’d like to buy, while Thinga.Me seems designed for collectors in particular.

Of course Microsoft is not the company behind the iOS operating system for iPhone, but in the past few years it has done more to support native iOS development (see the acquisition of Xamarin) and launch iOS apps, including the Hub and Word Flow keyboards.