Monday, December 7, 2009

Google Visual Search: Future Mobile App to Let You Snap Photo, Get Info About It?

Eweek writes:

Google is working on Google Visual Search, a mobile application that lets users take a picture of a location from their Android-powered smartphone and trigger a Google search that pulls up information associated with the image. The search engine revealed its plans on CNBC’s “Inside the Mind of Google,” segment Dec. 3.

According to Eweek, a sample case Google’s Hartmut Neven (of acquired Neven Vision) presented at CNBC was someone, like a tourist, taking a pic of Santa Monica pier, with Google then identifiying that in search results to let the tourist know more about the location. However, as Eweek continues, this project internally named “Google Goggles” didn’t “pass muster when Google tested it with a focus group in August,” with Google employees still busy fixing bugs and “building out the immense database required to propel the technology.”

In the future, who knows, we might have some of those goggles (or direct implants) augmenting our reality with meta info. Looking at a building we’d then immediately know when it was built, what’s to be found inside, and so on. Or imagine looking at a street of shops with those shops currently in their opening hours tinted green. Or a Shanghai shop sign with Chinese letters being automatically translated to the foreigner looking at it. The possibilities seem nearly endless (and might one day make those of us asking a human for directions seem completely outdated).

[Thanks DPic!]

Google Visual Search: Fut ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (1+4)

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