Google Goggles is the Real Deal
There’s been a lot of buzz the last few days about Google’s foray into Augmented Reality territory, but it’s the non-AR (technically) side of their new app, Google Goggles, that steals the show. I downloaded Goggles to the company Android phone today and gave it a test run. Actually, test run is an understatement – I ran around the office taking pictures of everything, amazed by the power of its photo recognition engine. One must assume that Goggles is, at least partly, the outcome of Google’s purchase of Neven Vision, an image recognition startup, back in 2006. It just might wind up being the company’s smartest aquisition, since it’s becoming safe to say that Google will own location AR once they get Goggles analyzing off a real time video feed.
While Goggles can recognize logos and graphics (it even recognized a painting in our office), upon use it’s obvious that it gets most of its power from text recognition – really good text recognition. The only thing it had trouble with were the words “BIG BOY” on my piggy bank, which it read as “BIG SOY” and then “BIO SOY,” both of which yielded interesting search results. As Google refines the engine to work faster and more reliably, though, it could wind up being the basis for true hyper-location AR.
Imagine this – a mobile app gets your relative position and direction from GPS and compass data (which Goggles already does), then behind the scenes, takes a snapshot from the camera. The image is analyzed by the recognition engine and matched with Google Street View images within your vicinity. Based on the scale and angle difference of the Street View image and the snapshot, the application is able to find nearly your exact location and place digital objects accordingly. No more will location AR be vague popups of information, but accurate modification of a real world view. To let up on processing and data transferring, the app could make this call every ten to twenty seconds and still produce results that would put every other location based AR company out of business.
I’m sure that someone at Google has already thought of something like this, so be ready for each successive update to Google Goggles bringing us one step closer to the ultimate vision of Augmented Reality.
For all you folks that don’t have an Android phone, here’s a video of me using Goggles around the office.
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Tags: Android, Google Goggles
[...] Goggles is the real thing, or so claims Blake Callens of Zugara. Nice video showing it identifying a dart [...]
December 13th, 2009 at 10:42 amWhile Goggles can recognize logos and graphics (it even recognized a painting in our office), upon use it’s obvious that it gets most of its power from text recognition – really good text recognition. The only thing it had trouble with were the words “BIG BOY” on my piggy bank, which it read as “BIG SOY” and then “BIO SOY,” both of which yielded interesting search results. As Google refines the engine to work faster and more reliably, though, it could wind up being the basis for true hyper-location AR.
September 29th, 2010 at 5:46 pmgood blog
October 6th, 2010 at 7:45 pm