Sunday, December 20, 2009

Ping - Google Goggles, Searching by Image Alone - NYTimes.com

A Google Goggles snapshot

It’s not hard to imagine a slew of commercial applications for this technology. You could compare prices of a product online, learn how to operate that old water heater whose manual you have lost or find out about the environmental record of a certain brand of tuna. But Goggles and similar products could also tell the history of a building, help travelers get around in a foreign country or even help blind people navigate their surroundings.

It is also easy to think of scarier possibilities down the line. Google’s goal to recognize every image, of course, includes identifying people. Computer scientists say that it is much harder to identify faces than objects, but with the technology and computing power improving rapidly, improved facial recognition may not be far off.

Ping - Google Goggles, Searching by Image Alone - NYTimes.com

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