This is absolutely amazing! – I just wonder what the “iCan’t” guys will be doing to match this application and its functionality? (*nudge, nudge*)Google will be utilizing more of our senses to search the internet. They are now moving beyond the ‘traditional’ typing of key words in the engine, by allowing people to search the net with mobile phone cameras.
Welcome to "Google Goggles" - a software that allows people to search online using pictures taken with phone cams – and it’s all based around the ground-breaking platform… the Android operating system.
During a demonstration in California, Google’s mobile search VP (Vic Gundotra) announced that an experimental version of ‘Goggles’ is available for people at the Google Labs website. The software already can recognise such images as: wine labels, books, landmarks, and much more.
According to Mr Gundotra, "When you take a mobile phone camera and connect it to the internet, it becomes an eye… Google Goggles lets you take a picture of an item and use the picture as the query."
He then went on to demonstrate the power of this application, by taking a picture of a wine bottle with a smart phone (I think it could have been a Motorola Droid). The software recognized the label in the image and then provided reviews, pictures and other internet data about the particular bottle of wine – all in a Google search results web page."It (the software) is in Google Labs because of the nascent nature of computer vision. In the future, you will be able to point (a camera phone) and we will be able to treat it as a mouse pointer for the real world… It is our goal to visually identify any image."
My goodness – perhaps I’m easily impressed, but with this type of technology already available, it makes me wonder how our next generation will be surfing the web??
See Google Goggles at Work
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