« Home | Tim says: I think you're just Boston biased. If it... » | Alias who? Last year they pulled the show mid-seas... » | saintlukas: in a section on intubation and airway,... » | James notes: hey, one good turn deserves another; ... » | Alias Update The best way to describe my relations... » | While I haven't been blogging much lately, I am ge... » | Template? Yes, I realized that I just changed the ... » | News from the worlds of Sports and Linguistics The... » | I usually leave the posting of baby pictures to my... » | Confession Ok, I'll admit it. I'm concerned about ... » 

10/13/2005

Armchair Futurist How cool would it be for Google or other search engines to take in input besides text? It seems like some pattern recognition intelligence should be on the horizon. Imagine being able to upload a picture to a search engine, and having it return matches from where that picture, or (gasp!) similar items in that picture can be found on the web. For example, if you took a phone-cam picture of a new car you see on the street, you should be able to send that to a search engine to recognize it, tell you what it is (ie Googling with "define:" at the beginning, which you can do now), where to buy them, news about them, all the normal Google functionality. Froogle, Google News, other results based on that image. The technology exists in a very affordable consumer level thumbprint recognition, and other biometrics, so I'm sure that at a higher level of computing there is this sort of more complex pattern recognition ability being developed, but it has yet to trickle down to us. On the one hand, it sounds so doable and likely to happen, and there is still my inner comicbook fanboy saying "holy technology, batman! thats like the bat-computer or something!" Find a clue to a crime, say a piece of fabric torn from clothing, and have Google display a list of matches for color and pattern. I believe that the technology will eventually become as widely available as a camera-equipped cellphone, where you can point your phone at something and be told what it is, how much it costs, or where you can find more information.

E-mail this post



Remember me (?)



All personal information that you provide here will be governed by the Privacy Policy of Blogger.com. More...