
Google Goggles - andrewpbrett
http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/
======
bradgessler
This is a great example of how Google could out-do the iPhone. The more non-
trivial mobile applications have some processing that happen in the cloud. If
Android phones could translate voice in real-time during a phone call and the
iPhone could not, which phone would you consider buying?

Realistically though Google wants their services and applications on _all_
platforms; now if only the App store would approve these...

~~~
paul9290
Yeah but to me the quality of any manufacturer then Apple falls short. I've
owned Windows Mobile, Andriod (HTC Hero) and now iPhone. iPhone for me is
superior.

Google i think needs to make their own device to match the quality/stability
of the iPhone!

~~~
stcredzero
_Yeah but to me the quality of any manufacturer then Apple falls short._

If it had been written "qualaty" then it would've been a delicious Dilbert
reference. (For more than one reason -- left as exercise, hint included.)

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jodrellblank
One step closer to photographing a sign in a foreign country and doing OCR
followed by Google Translate, maybe followed by overlaying the translated text
back on the sign.

I think this would be a killer feature. I've never had much of a positive
response when posting it as an idea previously - is it the case that if it
really would be a killer feature, people would be all over the idea as well as
the implementation, or is it possible to be a little supported idea that turns
into a killer feature?

(Edit: Or maybe it's just more a European thing where several foreign
languages are a few hours drive in any direction?)

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litewulf
One thought I had is that there really aren't enough different signs.

In most foreign countries, I've been able to recognize signs for bathrooms and
such, and most place names I can memorize (even if I can't read the language I
can still think "okay, I want to go to the one with the squiggly second
character").

I actually think this has high "cool factor", but have difficulty really
coming up with uses. I think restaurant menus (as mentioned by my sibling
comment) is probably the only real use, and even then knowing the name of the
dish doesn't guarantee an item I'm able to eat.

Also, when I go abroad, I am definitely not enabling data roaming. In some
countries, buying a prepaid SIM requires lots of documentation which is
difficult to do if wandering around doing tourist-y things, etc.

(Sorry, I do think the idea is cool, I'm just trying to come up with reasons
why its not the neatest thing since sliced bread)

~~~
thalur
> Also, when I go abroad, I am definitely not enabling data roaming.

I think this is an important point, which is freqently forgotten. So many apps
that would be useful in a foreign country are useless because they require
internet access. When I went to Bulgaria last year I would have loved to have
a translator app for my iphone, but every single one available required
internet access, which there's no way I'm paying for at £3/MB!

~~~
gaius
If you are with a provider that is everywhere anyway, like Vodafone or
T-mobile, the idea of roaming is very obviously just about gouging money. It's
not as if T-mobile has to pay a third party by the Mb to ship data from
Germany to the UK, they own all the infrastructure anyway!

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natmaster
Previous work in the domain by others:

Nokia: [http://digital.venturebeat.com/2008/04/11/nokia-develops-
nav...](http://digital.venturebeat.com/2008/04/11/nokia-develops-navigating-
system-based-on-image-recognition-landmarks/) (they use the golden gate as
their example too) Also:
<http://www.mobvis.org/publications/MMT2007_Paletta.pdf>,
[http://mirw09.offis.de/paper/What%20is%20That%20-%20Object%2...](http://mirw09.offis.de/paper/What%20is%20That%20-%20Object%20Recognition%20from%20Natural%20Features%20on%20a%20Mobile%20Phone.pdf)

'World browser': <http://www.wikitude.org/>

Using GPS together with the compass to get interesting results: 2006, Japan:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/28/technology/28locate.html> and now there are
iPhone applications [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2uH-
jrsSxs&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2uH-
jrsSxs&feature=player_embedded)

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thrdOriginal
For those of us who may have done a couple searches on the Market wondering
why this isn't showing up: google goggles requires Android version 1.6.

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jrockway
Which Android products with Market don't have 1.6 yet?

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mbrubeck
At least some of the HTC phones with "Sense" UI, like the Verizon Droid Eris,
are still shipping with Android 1.5.

~~~
thrdOriginal
The Sprint HTC Hero which launched two months ago as well as T-Mobile's
MyTouch both shipped with 1.5; the T-Mobile G1 can be upgraded to 1.5.

~~~
simanyay
myTouches should be on 1.6 already. T-Mobile was pushing the update in October
(November?).

~~~
anguslong
Confirmed on my MyTouch (worst phone name evar - though very happy with the
beast).

App works fantastic in practice in my tests, though choked on one case
tonight. Had kids in car, drove by movie theater -- no showtimes/reader board
visible outside (theater is in the mall).

Tried to get showtimes by 'reading' AMC theater logo on side of building
("daddy, why are you taking a picture of that building?"). No go. Google maps
and gps to the rescue.

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nym
Augmented reality starts becoming more than just a pipe dream. Expect a lot
more of this.

P.S. Just went to ARdevcamp at Hacker Dojo last Saturday- it was a really
exciting event. There were a lot more people than I expected, and lots of
interesting discussion about this emerging space.

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erikstarck
First there was the internet of Documents (www).

Then there was the internet of People (social networks).

And the internet of Places (maps, LBS, still happening).

Soon we will see the internet of _Objects_ and something like Google Goggles
will be the key driver.

Documents -> People -> Places -> Objects. What's next?

~~~
wallflower
Perhaps not Google. Maybe Google and Facebook.

Robert Scoble has an interesting perspective on the ambitions of Facebook.

"Phase 1. Harvard only.

Phase 2. Harvard+Colleges only.

Phase 3. Harvard+Colleges+Geeks only.

Phase 4. All those above+All People (in the social graph).

Phase 5. All those above+People and businesses in the social graph.

Phase 6. All those above+People, businesses, and well-known objects in the
social graph.

Phase 7. All people, businesses, objects in the social graph."

[http://scobleizer.com/2009/03/21/why-facebook-has-never-
list...](http://scobleizer.com/2009/03/21/why-facebook-has-never-listened-and-
why-it-definitely-wont-start-now/)

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Maciek416
Can anyone who has an Android phone who has tried this out for a few
hours/days report on how well this works in practice? This looks pretty
fantastic, especially if it can also read stuff like QR codes, etc.

~~~
harry
This works really well. Picked out the KU logo and Swingline staplers
perfectly. Choked on a big box o Jolly Ranchers. I'll prolly keep futzing with
this for the rest of the day now.

~~~
harry
Took a picture of a Halflife 2 poster I have in my office
([http://store.valvesoftware.com/productpages/prints/product_H...](http://store.valvesoftware.com/productpages/prints/product_HL2DogvStriderPoster.html))
- not only did it return a strider battle youtube but also a wiki article on
it.

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cmelbye
Damn you for making me want an Android-based phone, Google! First free turn-
by-turn navigation, now this. Argh. Once AT&T gets a good Android phone, I'm
switching.

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jcapote
Just tried it on my G1; This works _really_ well.

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mrtron
The number of mashups I would like to do...

Desperately awaiting an API.

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jpwagner
there's some scary future uses for this.

getting someone's number at a bar will be so much easier.

~~~
pgbovine
cell phone cams + face recognition + facebook ==> super creepy

EDIT: since people post so many pics of themselves on facebook under all sorts
of lighting conditions and angles, that might actually make face recognition
somewhat feasible from a cell phone cam. of course, efficiently searching thru
a corpus of millions of faces (each taken at several different angles) is an
enormous technical challenge. i envision some app like Shazam being developed
to recognize faces rather than songs ...

~~~
liuliu
I've done this kind of research 4 years ago based on general Internet image.
That was a failure, but because of the rising of Facebook, it might work
again. Someone already work on this for sometime: face.com.

~~~
quilby
Ive talked with one of the guys from face.com . They have put a lot of effort
into making their system very fast and scalable.

He told me that they built it from scratch and did not use OpenCV. Some parts
were even written in assembly.

Im pretty sure that this is the only web application that I use that has had
major parts of it written in assembly.

~~~
liuliu
I agree that for some specific tasks OpenCV is not particularly useful (I have
to write detector and trainer from scratch even there is opencv haartraining.
The OpenCV crowd are most interested in applying it to real-time video
processing and put little effort on Internet scale problem).

But for assembly optimization it is really not as useful as it used to be.
Scalability is more about how to get sub-linear time complexity and efficient
communication pattern. Nowadays c compiler can get fairly good assembly code
and for low level optimization, human cannot compete with machine (how many
people knows the particular cache line alignment trick on old core i7?).
Multimedia instructions (SSE/MMX/3D Now) are useful but most of them can be
done by function call instead of hand-crafted assembly.

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symesc
Google's relentless focus on speed within search is going to play perfectly in
the realm of augmented reality.

I anticipate a video version of this soon.

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Prolorn
Doesn't the "Places" feature count as video?

<http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/#place>

~~~
symesc
Yes.

But as per the other response here, I'm not sure it's using the video so much
as the location and orientation to deliver results.

I'd like to see a version, like the still-photos, whereby the search engine is
translating in real time as new objects enter the frame.

While I'm at it, I'd like it to perform these tasks with a T-800-style HUD.

Droid indeed.

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wallflower
I'm eagerly awaiting an AR app for language learning. See the native labels
for objects like a VH-1 Popup video.

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migpwr
It works surprisingly well! It also includes an option to rate the results at
the bottom of the search results.

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cyen
reminds me of a much more practical version of some of the cool bits from the
"sixth sense" interface that was presented at TED / all over the news awhile
ago - <http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/> . There, their
prototype was also able to "look at" an object and return information about it
immediately (e.g. you hold up a book in front of the camera, a processor
recognizes it and pulls some relevant information, and the mini projector next
to the camera projects the information back onto the book cover)

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quilby
Where does the info for the landmark recognition feature come from? Is it from
street view?

I dont see how the landmark recognition feature could be useful. If you have a
camera + 3g on your phone, you have a GPS.

~~~
mbrubeck
The latest iPod Touch has a video camera but no GPS. The same is true of
various other non-phone handheld tablets. (Though landmark recognition might
not be useful on those, since apparently it actually uses the GPS and compass
as input...)

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steveklabnik
Reminds me of the first time I saw TinEye. Mobile is sweet, though.

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natmaster
Very cool. I am interested in learning where they got their data from, and how
they trained their image recognition algorithms.

~~~
zooted
<http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/>

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JCThoughtscream
Oh, wow. With Google's backing, an AR future suddenly doesn't seem very far
off at all.

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wglb
Very cool. It seems to work on the first few things I tried with my droid.

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eduardoflores
why aren't they enabling this for PCs/Netbooks & webcams?

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ephermata
Speculation: Because those aren't as mobile as a phone, and because Android
needs something to differentiate itself from the iPhone. First seamless turn
by turn directions, now this.

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fleaflicker
there's an Easter egg in the yelp iphone app that does something similar.

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GrandMasterBirt
impressive. Yet another reason to get droid. I wonder if verizon will get
google to make these tools exclusively for the droid only.

~~~
nym
It's already on the market available for phones other than Verizon's droid
(tested on T-Mobile / G1).

