Google looks into the future
The days of staring at a statue, monument or building in a foreign city and wondering what it is and when it was built could soon be over. Search engine giant Google is testing out a new way of searching for information by simply taking a picture.
Called Goggles, the search tool allows users to take a picture of an object with their smartphone and submit that as their search request. Goggles analyses the object, be it a building, a monument, a wine bottle label or an artwork on a gallery wall, and returns related results. Searching for an artwork, for example, could return the name of the painting, the artist, as well as details on when it was painted. Similarly, a wine bottle label might return information on where it was made, details of its maker or even reviews of it by others.
Goggles is one of a new breed of connected applications known as augmented reality applications. Augmented reality overlays data onto visual images, such as historic sites or street views, based on data available from global positioning satellites and online sources such as Wikipedia and other content databases. To date augmented reality applications have relied mostly on GPS co-ordinates to identify objects. With Goggles, Google is aiming to be able to identify actual images and build search results around that.
The key to the success of Goggles is Google’s already extensive database of images that to date have been available through its image search database. Now Google is hoping to call on the billions of images it already stored to create new ways of searching. The search giant already has more than a billion images in its database ranging from buildings and monuments to album covers, logos and street scenes.
Right now the Goggles application is relatively limited, despite the extensive image database Google has available to it. Something that doesn’t appear in the Google database effectively doesn’t exist in Goggles. However, as more images are added to the database by users Goggles’ effectiveness will improve.
One of the concerns that Google has been quick to address in announcing Goggles is the issue of facial recognition. The company has said that it will blur out faces in Goggles for the time being. It has said that this will be the case until it is clear on the potential privacy implications of allowing users to identify others using Goggles.
Goggles is the latest in a growing list of mobile search applications that Google has rolled out over the past year as it looks to the future of search. This list includes voice search, which is now available in multiple languages, What’s Nearby, which identifies everything from banks to restaurants in the user’s vicinity and now Goggles.
Google Goggles – discussion
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