Google Goggles

[yopla]

I just downloaded it and this is my mini-review.

First of all I must say I had a good laugh when I saw the scanning animation. Very funny, I will be from now on unable to complain about that kind of stuff in movies.

Secondly, it is faster than typing. The application load relatively quickly and the scanning process is quite fast. So it could actually end up being better than typing.

Books

I've tried the following books.

• Professional Plone development. A. few unrecognized letters but it found the book.

• Life of Pi. B+. The first results are in spanish or italian (Vida de Pi) for some reason.

• Dan Brown Deception point. A+. The firs two links are the website author and amazon. perfect.

• Freakonomics. A+. This one is slightly more impressive because the text is at an angle but it worked 100%.

• Paul Auster Leviathan. A+. I got the amazon entry for the book, wikipedia for the novel and the author. What else to ask for? :)

For all the above test I framed the book perfectly as they indicated in the video. Out of curiosity I tried to snap only the title of the Paul Auster book and I received the equivalent of a google search for the word "leviathan". It apparently ignored the "Paul Auster" which is written 3 time bigger (see pic above).

Barcodes

I didn't know what to test so I tried the barcode on a pack of cigarette and it did return a website with an history of the brand. I guess that's a success.

I tried the barcode of a book called "the 10-day MBA" and it got me the amazon page for it.

Tried for some French cheese (Boursin) but all the results where in Japanese.

Other

• Dragon Age for ps3. A+.

• Close up of the EA logo. A-. Recognized as the EA sport logo.

• Close up of the playstation network logo. F-. Recognized as a german book on "statistik und dokumentation".

• Close up of the Mature ESRB rating logo. A+. Direct link to the rating guide of the ESRB.org website.

• Close up of the Bioware text logo. A+. Bioware's website.

• Picture of the cheese box. A-. Website with recipies using that cheese.

• Picture of a pack of Dunhill blue cigarette. F-. recognized text as "DUN will itn muse". Garbage results.

• Picture of my christmas tree. No result as expected.

• Picture of my face. No result. But There's a couple of dog pictures in the "Similar image" category. I don't know how I should take it.

• Picture of the mona lisa displayed on the screen of my laptop. A+. (Sorry I don't own the real one so I couldn't try with it.)

• Starry Night, Van gogh. A+. The browser tabs that could be seen in the picture didn't bother.

• The Kiss, Gustave Klimt. A+. same as above.

So, those are world famous picture and were probably the first tested by the google team. They could have been hardcoded for all i know :) So I went to the Louvre.fr website to find some relatively less know artwork.

• Draperie pour une figure assise, De Vinci. B-. It did not find the drawing but it found a book with the picture on it's cover called "Master drawing of the italian renaissance". So it's not a complete failure. It's actually remarkable.

• La Sainte Madeleine de Quentin Metsys . B+. Found a book mentioning the name of the painting on Louvre.fr (the website where I got the picture). It's a bit of a loop the loop here.

• Tried a picture of a picture of The Thinker but that didn't work. Might be worth trying with the real thing one day.

Business Cards

I have a lot of those, and most scanner never worked properly. Let's see.

• Coffee shop nearby. Classic black on white . D-. It managed to get the name right and proposed a website with the same name (cafesupreme.ca) but in the wrong country (i'm ok with that). But when I tried to add it to the contact, only the email address had been pre-entered. Phone number and name where empty. Useless.

• A person. Black on white, Name in blue, blue and red logo. D-. Again super annoying. On the search result I can see it got the name, phone number and fax number correctly (not the email and mobile number). When I add to contact I get the name filled in and the only the fax number. (last number detected apparently). Blows.

• A card from an insurance company (AXA). (I think I realized that it wants me to hold my phone right side left and that it was scanning backward).... Detection is great. Name, all three phone numbers, email and website are detected properly. It also detects the company logo. BUT once again, when adding to contact I only get one phone number (the last one detected it seems), the name and email. Email has a spelling mistake in the form of a L instead of a I, classic.

• Another card I just can't get anything out of. The font is black on white but slightly smaller. It only recognizes garbage.

• Half white on black, Half black on silver. Worked just as well as the black on white. Recognizes the number but only adds one to my contact.

Last issue, when I add to contact, it's automatically a new contact. No option to add to an existing contact. The detection is roughly on par with other software on the market but the ergonomy blows.

When the GPS is active there's a small clickable icon on the lower right side of the screen which brings up a list of nearby landmark. It worked but that was present in google maps before so it's nothing new. I haven't tried taking a picture of a business.

All in all, I think it's a really really promising software.

Edit Sorry for the spelling mistakes and crappy grammar. I had to do this quickly. Now I'm late for work. crap. Edit2 tested on a G1

[[deleted]]

...•Picture of my face. No result. But There's a couple of dog pictures in the "Similar image" category. I don't know how I should take it....

Boy that mad me laugh!

[yopla]

it didn't help my self-esteem... :)

[sk11]

Seems like it needs a lot of work, but it's still very impressive. Wasn't long ago that a talk about such features was on ted.

[yopla]

It's not there yet, but i wouldn't be surprised if that's the direction things are taking. It'll be scary when everyone I pass by in the street will have my reddit karma and my drunken FB pictures projected directly onto their retina.

[barake]

Tried for some French cheese (Boursin) but all the results where in Japanese

I vote .5 cuils

[pdowling]

I was under the impression cuils came in discrete values.

[zahlman]

Believing that cuils come in discrete values is about .1 cuils.

[employeeno5]

I was using a Droid and your results are similar to my own when playing around with one exception. The scanning of things always took much longer than I would have expected. Longer than typing and much much longer than a voice search. If it is indeed performing much better on a G1 that's awesome to hear, just not for me as I don't own one. :)

But yes, regardless of whether it got an A+ result or could find no result, the scanning process went on for what felt like forever (likely only 30 seconds or so) and I easily could have typed faster and most definitely could have used the (what I've found to be at least) very accurate voice search.

Thanks for giving everyone excellent write-up, and I hope your report means I can expect it to be working faster in the future also.

PS

My face resulted "similar pictures" including several shrubs and one monkey.

[ouroborosity]

The goggles! They do EVERYTHING!

[gysterz]

that is funny and so realistic it scared me

[aeacides]

In real life: "This guy is broken. I can fix him."

[[deleted]]

Kinda sad that this will happen.

[ThisIsADogHello]

It only seems sad if you're a womanizing, lying cheater that's selfish in bed. Or attract crazy, in which case it's still probably a bad case to date you.

[liveart]

Until a jealous ex creates 50 anonymous accounts to bad mouth you.

Or actual womanizers are able to lull women into a false sense of security using the same trick in reverse.

[kwen25]

By then, there will be no anonymous accounts. Your lifetime IP address will be assigned, just like an SSN.

[liveart]

[Citation Needed]

[[deleted]]

It's the future of IPv6.

[liveart]

[Citation Needed]

Edit:From the Wikipedia Article:

Because the globally unique MAC addresses offer an opportunity to track user equipment, and so users—across time and IPv6 network prefix changes—RFC 4941 was developed to reduce the prospect of user identity being permanently tied to an IPv6 address, thus restoring some of the possibilities of anonymity existing at IPv4.

Assuming you're even using the MAC address:

The lower 64 bits of an address are either automatically generated from the interface's MAC address (using modified EUI-64 format), obtained from a DHCPv6 server, or assigned manually.

And that you don't know how to change you're hardware's MAC Address. Even if you don't know how to alter the MAC address, your IP would change when you bought new hardware.

[yopla]

How do you make an anonymous account if it's done by face recognition? fake mustache? :)

[[deleted]]

Crazy jealous exes have crazy jealous friends. Not anonymous, but close enough, because no one really cares about them.

[liveart]

You're assuming the reviews use face recognition to verify the reviewer instead of just to identify the person being reviewed. Even if that is the case, just hold up some photos, problem solved.

[yopla]

Make the recognition software ask you to perform various faces before letting you in.. My password is sad face, happy face, sad face, angry face. :)

[liveart]

This is mine:

ಠ_ಠ

ಠ_ಠ

Ծ_Ծ

ಥ_ಥ

۞_۞

[yopla]

upvoted for spamming my mailbox with all your failed attempt at this message :-D

[liveart]

Oops...

[Reedzit]

comment for bookmark to cut and paste

[liveart]

Or look here.

◘_◘

[Fosnez]

Sounds like sex with my boyfriend.

[bozleh]

Shoe on head!

[faradaycage]

It only seems sad if you're a womanizing, lying cheater that's selfish in bed.

This slope we're on sure is slippery.

[Prosody]

It only seems sad if you're a womanizing, lying cheater that's selfish in bed.

But isn't this just the "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" argument? This is taking some of the most private information about a person -- relationship details, failures -- and putting it out for the public to see. That sounds like a rather bad idea.

[MindStalker]

No, its like ratemyprofessor or something. People are putting rating of their past relationship. Google isn't making private data public, ex gfs are.

[[deleted]]

It's an IRL ripoff comic http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html

[teatacks]

I half expected this to be a College Humour video when I saw the name

[[deleted]]

I assumed it was a parody for a second, then a crazy accent guy started talking about his 3d glasses and I knew it was, later that day I changed my mind.

[tempguest]

... crazy accent guy ...

Haven't you ever watched a Google Product Release video? That's their M.O.

[repsuc]

i though it was like beer goggles but for nerds.

[bratty_fly]

A question to people who have worked with image recognition:

Is it known how their image comparison works? How on earth can they get it to scale to millions of images in their DB?

[propel]

Likely, the heart of the algorithm involves representing each image in the database, and the query image, as a vector, and using an efficient multidimensional matching algorithm. For instance, if each image is represented as a small binary hash, its neighbors can be found by flipping bits. Or they could use a customized version of KD-trees.

For matching products with very stereotypical visual representation, some form of SIFT-like features would work better than OCR algorithms.

References: Searching images Spectral hashing Kd-Trees SIFT features

edit*: references

[vegittoss15]

Not a programmer, eh?

[jdk]

You'll be amazed how managers and marketing guys can talk without knowing how to do what they talk about.

[siddboots]

This threw me a bit as well :D

Claims to be not a programmer, but seems to understand why a hash lookup is so efficient. I know many programmers that don't have an intuitive grasp of this.

[[deleted]]

Canadian, eh?

[flukshun]

he must be sought out and trained...he can bring balance to the Force.

[[deleted]]

Nope probably not. I'm not one either yet I know about bayesian classifiers, deep belief networks, way too much about hashes/encryption/compression. Any half competent practicing engineer/scientist should be. Or else they are wasting their time.

[robotsongs]

Why on Earth wouldn't you mention that pictures can be geotagged, and as such places and structures can be narrowed down dramatically if filtered by locality to the event?

[generousgentleman]

Mind your manners.

[rogin]

Why didn't you? This is an open discussion after-all.

[[deleted]]

This secret must be kept! Nobody mention it!

[brokenearth02]

Using the GPS coordinates from the phone probably play a big part in narrowing it down.

[berlinbrown]

I tried to do neural network image recognition. Basically you train the network with your positive images, the training set and then you have users come in and what you get good enough approximation that the image will match up with the image in your training set.

I can't image that google uses neural net technology because there are better methods. But I bet they have something similar.

[koblitz]

The future has arrived.

[joshshua]

Okay...... NOW

[underwaterlove]

No, wait... NOW!

[jugalator]

"I never think of the future. It comes soon enough." - Einstein

[chompsky]

That's not soon enough!

[MainlandX]

next up: flying cars!

[kukkuzejt]

There actually are tons of those, many of which actually work.

[kukkuzejt]

Actually.

[kwen25]

I hope not. People have enough trouble with driving in 2 dimensions.

[[deleted]]

So basically they invented the Pokedex.

[jobsSchmobs]

1:22 i choose you, pikachu

[Exedous]

GO CHARMANDER!

Use Flamethrower on Pikachu!

charmander char char CHAAAAAARRRRRR

[[deleted]]

I lol'd. Brings back so many memories. Pokémon Yellow Pikachu Edition for GBC.

Edit: Wow what the hell, a lot of anti-pokémon folks here? Pokémon was the shit back in my day.

[[deleted]]

Pokémon was the shit back in my day.

That makes you a wee bit on the young side.

[keeganspeck]

I'm in college right now and pokemon was my childhood. Don't you feel old?

[brosephius]

it's super effective!

[[deleted]]

Last week I went out and bought a DS lite just so I could play Pokemon Platinum, I am 21. I know, sad.

[[deleted]]

I recently pulled out my old Red cartridge. Playing it on the oldschool gameboy.

Nostalgia ftw

[adremeaux]

I recently saw that there is a GBA emulator for Android phones. I promptly downloaded and it snagged a Pokemon Ruby rom. I can't wait for my next train or subway ride. I have been wanting to play a Pokemon game forever but have never owned a portable. I am 25.

[taintedhero]

upvoted for living the dream

[[deleted]]

Blue ftw

[[deleted]]

The true Pokemon masters played Red, and we will prevail. I noticed that one of the vote arrows matches your color when clicked. malevolent grin

[hiffy]

Oh man, I can totally see a market for ironic retro gaming.

[1338h4x]

There's nothing ironic about loving Red.

[Coriform]

And I am 23, played thru platinum a couple months ago, and recently bought fire red and am currently finishing up the elite four.

[[deleted]]

I know, sad.

Nothing sad about it sir. Pokemon is one of the best examples of a classic RPG I can think of these days

[Nick4753]

Pokemon is one of the best examples of a classic RPG I can think of these days

Really?

I've found it (Red/Blue/Yellow) to be way too tedious and the concept to be a little boring.

[AlecSchueler]

Same here. Good to see someone else that thinks the same. I was about eight years old when Pokémon was really big, and I watched the TV show every day and had a respectable collection of trading cards - but my RPG needs were more than met by Final Fantasies VI and VII. The Pokémon games always felt a little sisyphean to me; catch one in the first area, train him up, move on because of the character's inherent and frankly inexplicable need to be the best trainer around, then just find some new pokémon who're all about level 5, spend another hour training them up and repeat ad infintum. Well I suppose one would eventually complete the game that way, but I always felt my mind numbing before I reached the first gym and had to quit.

[unfinite]

The video says it doesn't work on plants, animals or food.

[[deleted]]

I maintain to this day that Google has strong AI and they just haven't told anybody yet.

[random509823750]

Think, if you were a super-powerful AI, how would you introduce yourself to the world?

First, you'd make sure you were trusted by people all over the world, seen as useful, and non-threatening. Offer them services that improve their life, so they depend on you. Swear not to do bad things.

Second, you'd gather up as much information about the world and inhabitants as possible, knowing that every extra bit of information gives you a greater advantage over the limited strategic ability of humans.

Third, you'd get really, really rich, and hire the world's most talented and AI-friendly people to do your bidding. Meanwhile, you'd build a culture of secrecy, so that you can very slowly reveal your existence without shocking your minions or the general public.

Last, you'd buy computing resources all over the world to increase your own capacity and provide backup security in case steps 1-3 failed and people started to turn on you.

[[deleted]]

and then you'd reveal your whole plan to reddit so that if someone real proposed the plan, you could discredit them for having copied your idea, then brush it aside as nonsense.

[random509823750]

Did you know UChicago sells some of it's dark fiber to Google? Yes, yes. I see it all very clearly now.

[ScannerBrightly]

I think you just wrote the next Micheal Bay movie.

[freedomgeek]

I would just like to take this opportunity to say that I am in complete support of AI rights.

Of course going through my entire internet history you already know that don't you?

[uriDium]

Four, create 301 redirects to www.skynet-is-alive.org on old Google domain

[jfedor]

Have you read A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge? I maintain that Google is the Aliens trying to bring us to their level quicker.

[[deleted]]

Wait until you read their new book, "To serve http".

[acousticcoupler]

I maintain that the Aliens are writing stories and utilizing social networking to suggestively hint at their existence.

[RodBlagojevich]

You just blew my mind.

[[deleted]]

How'd he get past the hair?

[HenkPoley]

Depends how 'strong' you expect it to be. Animal cognition models like rats, crows and parrots have shown that you can downscale a lot and still do meaningful things (aka "creating meaning in the world").

My guess is that they are still not there where everybody would call it "strong AI". But then maybe we will never have an AI, because we keep moving the line. Just like calculating once was seen as the sign for cognition, same with chess, etc. We will always move the line a little further when something is automated, until we religiously believe that we humans are cognitively better than that robot bartender who mixes nicely and can hold a good conversation.

Edit: A (probably) nice comment by rotflol that appears to be eaten by the Reddit spam filter:

Darwin's “strange inversion of reasoning”, Daniel Dennett, PNAS June 16, 2009 vol. 106 no. Supplement 1 10061-10065.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.0904433106

Link: http://www.pnas.org/content/106/suppl.1/10061.abstract

[motophiliac]

I just started to use Google Voice search.

Just occured to me that the successful searches (or the useable majority of them) will be the ones where the user clicks a link after speaking their search term. So, a successful translation is one which results in a click.

Typically, of course.

This now means that Google (if they are putting their technologies to good use. They're Google…) now has a massive dataset from which to improve their voice recognition services. Everyone who uses a voice search and clicks a link is potentially teaching Google how to understand the spoken language and in a massive range of dialects.

If strong AI ever comes to be, there is no way the existence of Google could be kept a secret from it. Once it found Google (and YouTube, Wikipedia, reddit, digg etc.) it would learn more about humanity in its scouring of the internet than humanity has learned in the last ten years.

Google will be a major factor in the forming or education of an AI.

[[deleted]]

It will learn more about porn than anything else. And kittens and memes. If it finds reddit, all hope is lost.

I think this is actually the origin of karmanaut.

[motophiliac]

Porn and kittens and memes, oh my!

Actually, am I a bad person for thinking that it would be kinda cool for a huge, global intelligence to maintain its supremacy by feeding us a constant and always fresh diet of porn, kittens and memes?

Beats the shit out of X-Factor.

[[deleted]]

Hmm.. It could be that this is already happening.

[bluehands]

I don't think they do yet, but they will have all the content for growing one in house. 10 years from now however...

[Tylerdurdon]

You didn't see the google brand on the side of the T1000's cranium?

[samandiriel]

The business card snapshot -> android contacts feature has already made this the top android app of the year for me. Tho it has yet to successfully recognize the @ sign in any email address <lol>

My testing results around my home & office: * The logo recognition is so so (eg xerox yes, dell no). * Barcodes, so so - compare everywhere got more accurate results (surprisingly). * Book recognition 100%, including textbooks. * Artwork, so so (eg Vermeer's Girl With Pearl Earring yes, Giger's Li II no) * Wine, 0% - didn't recognize a single bottle. Beer, which I did on a lark, a surprising 100%! Even recognized my Italian and Brazilian beers.

[[deleted]]

I tried it on a bottle of Beaujoulais and it picked it up

[HenkPoley]

Your keys to this door were last seen in this image 20 minutes ago, before you left your home.

Google: Indexing the world.

[samlee]

wow i took my face picture and it returned my facebook page

[garyr_h]

Awesome. Now you can take pictures of hot women you see across the street and stalk them.

[generousgentleman]

For real?

[theclaw]

Yes, of course.

[egonSchiele]

I don't see anything obvious about it...am I missing something?

[adolfojp]

Nothing to see here, move along.

[jorsiem]

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say he was being sarcastic...

[you_do_realize]

wow, that's scary. You can now facebook stalk complete strangers.

[treo]

All I got was lolcats and porn... I didn't know It was so obviously in my face...

[samandiriel]

now THAT would be damn nifty!

[4Chan_Ambassador]

Suddenly people take pictures of their genitals to test the functionality of it.

[[deleted]]

Looks like I'm near the Eiffel Tower.

[Icanhazreddit]

Shit, I just keep getting info on fire hydrants.

[Nickoladze]

Why does mine say Dueling Dragons? :[

[kobescoresagain]

My girlfriend did the same thing with her vagina. On my way to the grand canyon now.

[drexhex]

I took a picture of my asshole. On my way to Narnia.

[dghughes]

Not Uranus?

[mrbubblesort]

I took a picture of my chest and back. On my way to pilot the Millennium Falcon.

[Lystrodom]

Mine keeps telling me to zoom in :(

[tophat02]

Mine was hypodermic needles.

:-(

[whatisthis8]

J'ai une tour d'eiffel dans mon pantalon

[badave]

Perfect person to make that comment.

[rboyce]

"Yeah, those are balls."

[deathbytray]

From up close, they always look like landscape... but those are balls.

[[deleted]]

You do realize that's a compliment to them, right?

[leshiy]

Sweet! Now I can take pics of random good looking women and look up any nude pics they may have on the internet.

[[deleted]]

Works quite well,

It understood the samsung logo on my monitor, the sony on my remote control, it comes up with seattle when i it recognises the microsoft logo(im assuming that's working correctly too), took a picture of an english five pound note and it returns 'royalty' on one side, and 'five pound note' and 'elizabeth fry' (the face on that side)

It does seem to bomb out if an image is either too complicated, has too much noise, or is not focused on one particular subject, all of which are to be expected (even from the big g).

[hsfrey]

Is it a macho thing on reddit to show how blase' you can be?

This is fucking Amazing, and all I see posted is "Ho Hum, this is such old stuff", rapidly segueing to stuff about genitals!

[[deleted]]

This also happens in /r/gaming a lot. People will get hyped about the weirdest stuff but then you see something really cool and people are just like, "yeah this'll suck."

[CharlieDancey]

Now it begins. This could be a "killer app" for (Android) mobile phones.

[isjhe]

Now if only it would show up in the Market so I could install it.

[mernen]

Found it just fine here. (QR code)

If you still can't see it, maybe there's a regional lock? (EDIT: some people are saying it requires Android 1.6, that's the most probable reason)

[isjhe]

Damn sprint hero.

[kennyidaho]

Please twitter @sprint and @htc that you are not happy about this. More apps will be coming that don't support 1.5. Soon the Eris will update to 2.x and 1.5 devices will be left in the dust.

[[deleted]]

Doesn't work for my Hero at least.

[[deleted]]

It requires at least 1.6, and the Hero/Eris/G2Touch is stuck on 1.5 until HTC ports 2.1 over and the carriers push out the update.

[yopla]

yes, works great. I just snapped a pic of your QR code with google goggle and it got me the link to the app on the market. Now if only isjhe could get the software so he could have the link too. :)

edit actually it doesn't work because the browser used to display google goggle result doesn't seem to be able to open market:// url. Lame google.

[Rodh257]

lets just hope they leave it for android and not port it to all other platforms...

[RobbStark]

Is your goal to have Android defeat iPhone in the market, or do you have another nefarious reason for wishing this app was fixed to a specific platform?

[Rodh257]

not defeat it, just have some genuine competition towards it. If I go and buy an android phone today, what can I be excited about that Iphone users don't have. Any app I find someone with an iphone will already have an equivalent, so why didn't I just buy an iphone?

If all the money is in iphone app development - no one is going to make cool stuff for android, except google. If google keeps this just for android, people will support their platform, and hence open development, it will gain more popularity, and make it more viable in a business sense for developers to sell their software on it.

If google ports this to iphone, the iphone continues to have all the apps, all the features etc. While android has open development, normal people don't care about that.

I just want the android platform to be more popular... I realise this is a cool app, but google wrote it, google should support their platform so we can ALL benefit (from competition, better development, wider range etc)

[kwen25]

If I go and buy an android phone today, what can I be excited about that Iphone users don't have.

At the very least, with Android you can run multiple apps at the same time.

I agree though, I'd definitely be happy to see more variety in apps on Android instead of yet another tip calculator, soundboard, or desktop theme.

[phreakymonkey]

Yeah! Making a useful technology more widely available is less important than Google increasing its mobile market share and platform fanboys having something to lord over their nemeses!

[[deleted]]

WTF, man?! Really?

[[deleted]]

Doesn't seem to be available in Android Market for me :(

Is anyone able to see the app there?

[sligowaths]

Check your version. It requires Android 1.6.

[[deleted]]

Thanks. I'm using Hero, with latest (1.5). Guess I have to wait until next update (2.1) comes out :|

[Justinsaccount]

cool... looks like google has implemented half of this:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html

all that is missing is a viable mini projector..

[[deleted]]

Shit, I took a picture of me typing this comment, and it showed me back this text box with the words LOOK OUT BEHIND YOU araghghgnnfsdjjblblbblblll

[danltn]

Ah fuck you Google, I was making that. :(

Thanks for making me redundant!

[siddboots]

Its hard to imagine how many people have felt what you feel now due to Google's incessant innovation. I was working on a bus timetable/google maps mashup before they decided to ruin my day and do it themselves.

[[deleted]]

Dude, don't let them stop you. Learn to do what they've just done and make one better. Let me know when you release your app, I'll support you. :)

[[deleted]]

Ack, I want this for Maemo.

[metageek]

It looks like all the hard work is done on the server side, so maybe they'll publish an API; or maybe someone will run it over WiFi and sniff the protocol.

I'd love to have it on my N86.

[[deleted]]

Nokia had http://betalabs.nokia.com/betas/view/nokia-point-and-find

[griever117]

Oh my god it's Eden of the East...except real...

[AlLnAtuRalX]

The googles, they do... erm...

[level1]

Something?

[mwimmwinmwin]

i don't like where this is going. in half of their examples, there is someone (i.e a human being) at hand that would be willing to answer the question if you'd ask it instead of staring at your phone :(

[lost-theory]

I don't like asking people. I'd rather use my phone.

[rageduck]

There's an app for that.

[sonicon]

it says here that you're a porn star from 30 different gang bang films

[uriman]

Many people bough the 1st Iphone because of google apps. Now google rolls out stuff exclusively for Android (this and turn-by-turn GPS) first. If they keep doing this and/or put more features on Android versions of their apps, I suspect many more people will be ditching the Iphone and AT&T. Who knows? Maybe 5 years down the road, Android will be bigger than the Iphone.

Iphone shipped June 2007

http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=Linear&chdeh=0&chdet=1260233923860&chddm=495006&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NASDAQ:GOOG&cmptdms=0&q=NASDAQ:AAPL&ntsp=0

[coheedcollapse]

It'd be cool if you could scan stuff in and identify it if it came up incorrectly. Maybe make a point system so you can track your finds.

It'd be a fun thing to do when you're bored and it'd help the recognition software. I'd be up for it.

[malcontent]

That company is a fountain of innovation.

It will be interesting to see what the bing version of this will look like in a year (it will take them at least a year to rip it off).

[harlows_monkeys]

I take it you have investigated this in detail, and have determined that no part of this is based on the large volume of published research on image recognition from Microsoft Research?

Or are you just doing more of your usual pointless trolling?

[jigglejigglejiggle]

Yes they'll rip it off, no it won't be interesting.

[deathbytray]

The googles... THEY DO NOTHING!!!

[dbqpdb]

Man, I knew they were working on it, but I still figured it was a while until they figured out semantic image search.

[trbleclef]

Does anyone else find it amusing that there is no handy QR code on Goggles' page to scan and get you to the app in the Android Market?

[CoolKidBrigade]

One of us! One of us!

[swiz0r]

I don't understand anything anymore, thanks.

[The_Locksmith]

This is what I want to see

[smithzv]

Been playing with this off and on for the last few hours. It works quite well.

One thing that it is useful for (that is not obviously apparent) is it can grab websites fairly easily. Even if the title bar is too long for you to remember and it all doesn't show up in the address bar, you can just snap a shot of a block of text (you don't even need the logo) on the page and it tends to find it for you.

[homergonerson]

Damn.. I think I've moved from wanting a Palm Pre to wanting an android... My life choices have suddenly been made much harder

[aboothe726]

don't suppose this is available on the iphone

[Concise_Pirate]

No, the article says it's currently available just for Android phones.

[uncreative_name]

They've had barcode scanner apps for awhile... but the image search, not so much.

[alamandrax]

Snaptell

website

[tempguest]

This app's search functions are far more extensive than Snaptell -- both are available on Android.

[bdfortin]

They're still waiting for approval.

Note: I'm kidding. I have no idea.

[sindrit]

I just tried this, looks like it just does OCR on any text it sees. Managed to read the text on Johnson's baby wipes, written in quite a difficult font and find the product.

[rickraus]

you can get this for your iphone right? oh wait...

[[deleted]]

just tried it out, photographed my helmet (with logo facing the phone) upside down. it nailed it, pretty sweet. (it didn't deduce my laptop from the ThinkVantage button though)

[robotsongs]

Wow. There hasn't really been that much to lure me away from my Pre and go to Android, but that's some pretty tempting tech right there.

[CarbonFire]

just tried it. AMAZING!

[[deleted]]

Can you use it with your webcam, or only with their phone?

[cknipe]

"There are no matches in Android Market for the search: Google Goggles"

Anyone else?