X(10)-mas in New York: Google Goggles Demo
Saturday, 26 December 2009 02:58 | 
Written by rog | 
Today, we have some impressions of an app called 'Google Goggles', which basically provides search results based on pictures taken of objects or places. It is available on the Android Market, and we installed it as one of the first things on the Xperia X10.
Google Goggles is one of the latest products from Google Labs, which means that it is in an early stage of development. What it does is pretty simple: if you see something you want to know more about, take a picture, and Google Goggles will tell you where you can get more information. According to Google, this currently works in the following areas:
- Landmarks
- Contact Info
- Books
- Artwork
- Places
- Wine
- Logos
We gave it a try with a few different objects: Heinz Ketchup bottle, Toblerone chocolate and AMC 25 movie theatre in NYC. This all works amazingly well, as you can see in our video below:
There are also a couple of fails, the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center was not recognized for example. It seems that Google Goggles uses a combination of techniques to recognize objects on pictures, such as OCR (Optical Character Recognition), position information from the cell phones GPS and some kind of picture comparison algorithm. Also, the auto focus of the X10's 8MP camera comes in handy for those close up shots.
Pretty cool way to look up information on objects, isn't it? Will it change the way we use Google (or other search engines)? Probably not - but it is another glimpse on what is possible with recent mobile phones.
In our next episode of 'X(10)-mas in New York', we will head back to a more established application called 'Places' - it helped us to find a Sushi restaurant and get us some impressions of the place already before we were even close to it.
