Google will be giving demonstrations of the new Google Goggles technology at the upcoming Augmented Reality NY and Augmented Reality LA meetups.  If you haven’t seen Google Goggles before, I suggest checking out the embedded video below.  This is a game changing technology and sure to be a killer app for any mobile device.  Both events are usually livestreamed so even if you’re not in either city, you can still watch the presentation…

ARNY (Augmented Reality New York) meetup is this Tuesday, 8/17 – more info here.

ARLA (Augmented Reality Los Angeles) meetup is this Wednesday, 8/18 – more info here.

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.

Follow me on Twitter, @blakecallens