Snap and Search (No Words Needed)

THE world, like the World Wide Web before it, is about to be hyperlinked. Soon, you may be able to find information about almost any physical object with the click of a smartphone.

This vision, once the stuff of science fiction, took a significant step forward this month when Google unveiled a smartphone application called Goggles. It allows users to search the Web, not by typing or by speaking keywords, but by snapping an image with a cellphone and feeding it into Google’s search engine.

How tall is that mountain on the horizon? Snap and get the answer. Who is the artist behind this painting? Snap and find out. What about that stadium in front of you? Snap and see a schedule of future games there.

Goggles, in essence, offers the promise to bridge the gap between the physical world and the Web.

Computer scientists have been trying to equip machines with virtual eyes for decades, and with varying degrees of success. The field, known as computer vision, has resulted in a smattering of applications and successes in the lab. But recognizing images at what techies call “scale,” meaning thousands or even millions of images, is hugely difficult, partly because it requires enormous computing power. It turns out that Google, with its collection of massive data centers, has just that.

“The technology exists and was developed by other people,” said Gary Bradski, a computer vision expert and a consulting professor of computer science at Stanford. “The breakthrough is doing this at scale. There are not many entities that could do that.”

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Tags: goggles, Google, Google goggles, object search, picture search, Search, Search Engine, Snap and Search, Web search engine, World Wide Web

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 20th, 2009 at 12:53 pm and is filed under Computers & Humans, Consider This, Innovation, Innovation in Society, NY Times, Shape of Things to Come?, disruptive innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.