If you’re like me, you probably use your iphone/android/whatever phone camera as a visual journal. Certainly I shoot creative photos with it, but I’m also constantly generating snapshots of things I like, patterns, ideas, magazine covers, ads, and other stuff that act as inspiration or reminders for me to check out something in greater detail later when I’ve got more time.
Well, Google’s new-ish app “Google Goggles” capitalizes on this. Snap a photo, do a search with that photo as the input, and get results. I’m only just starting to play with it, but Google claims that in addition to text the app recognizes landmarks, books, wine, artwork, logos and more.
And, since I shoot a lot of advertising imagery, what really got my attention was when they recently announced advertising partnership “tests” with Disney, Buick, Delta, T-Mobile and Diageo. Use the app to snap a photo of certain enabled print adverts in a magazine, billboard, or whatever–hit “go”– and you’re suddenly immersed in a rich media experience with results galore to explore.
If this is the case, how soon will it be that all your images will be recognizable by visual search rather than simply the Google Goggle enabled campaigns, or the metadata attached to the image. Or even cooler, when your un-tagged images have been sniffed and are returned in search based on their pixel content. Will a search for “Toyota” soon return this image of mine, will a search for “diabetes” return this one, or perhaps even a search for “women’s underwear” might soon return even this one? I’m banking that it won’t be long.
I think my mind just exploded.
A couple videos about how Google Goggles works, plus a link to download the apps and find out more after the jump. Hit ‘continue reading’ below.
This vid is the original one about the basic functionality
This vid is the one that really got my attention, where Google announces it broadened effectiveness in partnerships with a handful of print advertisers.
Get the Google Goggles app for iPhone, Android, and find out more here.
WOW. Can’t wait to see what comes next.
I’ve been using it on Android over the last few months and it seems to do a great job. For photographers, it’ll be extra important to ensure you properly enter your contact details in the metadata fields so when someone else finds your image via a Goggles search, they’ll know who to contact for licensing.
“so simple but so complex”
You hit the nail on the head Chase, it’s like Brian Eno says, most things in the world require a large amount of input energy for not much return, this requires very little input to get a (potentially) big result.
I wonder if this can help photographers, image libraries, designers, artists, etc to keep a track of copyright infringements of their work?
Is this fully working in the U.K ?
all i can get is the Google App, can’t seem to launch google goggles
Goggles is part of the google app for the iPhone….