By This past December Google published Google Goggles to Android Market. It didn’t create a HUGE stir, but the possibilities and potential implications of its practical use are certainly far reaching. Snap a picture of a place, thing, barcode, text or anything else and the seemingly magic Goggles will tell you at exactly what you’re looking! At MWC 2010 some of its future uses were demoed on video and it could introduce some really interesting possibilities for us Android lovers.
Today, Google took steps to show they mean business about Google Goggles and the app isn’t some novelty you’ll try a couple times and discard and/or ignore. For an undisclosed sum, Google has just purchased Plink – announced on their Blog and Twitter, and reported by TechCrunch.
Plink is the team behind PlinkArt, an application where you take a picture of an art piece and it sends you detailed information on that particular painting.
Work on the existing app will halt and the team will immediately begin focusing their efforts on Google Goggles. I think its safe to say that Goggles will soon be able to identify paintings and other pieces of art with relative ease.
I find Google Goggles to be a rather fascinating initiative for Google. Other applications narrow their focus by attempting to scan barcodes, QR codes, tourist attractions, and Art as we see with Plink. The advantage here is the given application already assumes what category or type of person/place/thing you’re scanning, meaning it doesn’t have to do any “thinking” to differentiate what KIND of thing you’re scanning. The apps already assume you’re scanning something specific. The goal of Google Goggles is to allow you to scan ANYTHING and have it be recognized. That’s a HUGE feat to accomplish and there is a lot of room for error.
By the way… Plink won ADC2. That’s one way to gain Google’s attention!
People may be missing the connection between this and Google search. Remember when they launched GOOG411 and got sound bytes of thousands of people. They have leveraged that into voice search, dictation of voice mails, and auto-captions on Youtube. Now they are maturing a system that, when combined with face recognition from Picasa, will allow Google’s image search to find things based on what is in the image and not just what text is near the image. It all comes back to search.
Goggles doesn’t even show up in my Market. I have a cliq. I’m assuming it’s because you need 2.1 for it to work? Could explain part of why it didn’t create a huge stir… Not everyone can get it.
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But will it be able to spot the original painting from the fake? ;)
It already does a pretty great job of recognizing art. I saw a picture of someone’s background on their home screen in a gallery over at DroidForums. I loved it and wanted to know who the artist was. I scanned it with Goggles and lo’ and behold I got what I was looking for.
It’s a great app.
I think its a good idea as Google has Goggles lol