Realistically though Google wants their services and applications on all platforms; now if only the App store would approve these...

Google i think needs to make their own device to match the quality/stability of the iPhone!

If it had been written "qualaty" then it would've been a delicious Dilbert reference. (For more than one reason -- left as exercise, hint included.)

I think this would be a killer feature. I've never had much of a positive response when posting it as an idea previously - is it the case that if it really would be a killer feature, people would be all over the idea as well as the implementation, or is it possible to be a little supported idea that turns into a killer feature?

(Edit: Or maybe it's just more a European thing where several foreign languages are a few hours drive in any direction?)

In most foreign countries, I've been able to recognize signs for bathrooms and such, and most place names I can memorize (even if I can't read the language I can still think "okay, I want to go to the one with the squiggly second character").

I actually think this has high "cool factor", but have difficulty really coming up with uses. I think restaurant menus (as mentioned by my sibling comment) is probably the only real use, and even then knowing the name of the dish doesn't guarantee an item I'm able to eat.

Also, when I go abroad, I am definitely not enabling data roaming. In some countries, buying a prepaid SIM requires lots of documentation which is difficult to do if wandering around doing tourist-y things, etc.

(Sorry, I do think the idea is cool, I'm just trying to come up with reasons why its not the neatest thing since sliced bread)

Uses would be more about being a tourist and getting a feel for where you are than mens/womens toilets - as you say, you can memorise those fairly quickly.

More like, standing in a subway, there's a poster, it says something about the train something ... wonder what? Walking past a big lake, there's a sign about some project that involves a pipe low down and a pipe further up, but what is it doing - taking thermal energy or using the water as coolant? Walking through the city streets, there's a plaque on the side of a building - something something 1872 something national? people? something something Joan 1st. Eh? What's on these fliers that are being handed out? What are the menu descriptions?

The easier it is to do, the more likely you are to do it - it's only important things that you would fish out a dictionary and start deciphering, this would be for everything and anything which attracts your interest.

Good point about the data roaming, though.

I think this is an important point, which is freqently forgotten. So many apps that would be useful in a foreign country are useless because they require internet access. When I went to Bulgaria last year I would have loved to have a translator app for my iphone, but every single one available required internet access, which there's no way I'm paying for at £3/MB!

I attended their launch party last month in Seattle. Works surprisingly well.

Nokia: http://digital.venturebeat.com/2008/04/11/nokia-develops-nav... (they use the golden gate as their example too) Also: http://www.mobvis.org/publications/MMT2007_Paletta.pdf, http://mirw09.offis.de/paper/What%20is%20That%20-%20Object%2...

'World browser': http://www.wikitude.org/

Using GPS together with the compass to get interesting results: 2006, Japan: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/28/technology/28locate.html and now there are iPhone applications http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2uH-jrsSxs&feature=playe...

http://www.gsmarena.com/tmobile_g1_and_mytouch3g_get_android...

App works fantastic in practice in my tests, though choked on one case tonight. Had kids in car, drove by movie theater -- no showtimes/reader board visible outside (theater is in the mall).

Tried to get showtimes by 'reading' AMC theater logo on side of building ("daddy, why are you taking a picture of that building?"). No go. Google maps and gps to the rescue.

P.S. Just went to ARdevcamp at Hacker Dojo last Saturday- it was a really exciting event. There were a lot more people than I expected, and lots of interesting discussion about this emerging space.

Then there was the internet of People (social networks).

And the internet of Places (maps, LBS, still happening).

Soon we will see the internet of _Objects_ and something like Google Goggles will be the key driver.

Documents -> People -> Places -> Objects. What's next?

Robert Scoble has an interesting perspective on the ambitions of Facebook.

"Phase 1. Harvard only.

Phase 2. Harvard+Colleges only.

Phase 3. Harvard+Colleges+Geeks only.

Phase 4. All those above+All People (in the social graph).

Phase 5. All those above+People and businesses in the social graph.

Phase 6. All those above+People, businesses, and well-known objects in the social graph.

Phase 7. All people, businesses, objects in the social graph."

http://scobleizer.com/2009/03/21/why-facebook-has-never-list...

You should check out FluidDB from the FluidInfo guys... http://fluidinfo.com/

Edit: I tried an image of the Centrino and Vista logos side by side on my laptop and its top result was for a German book. It did get the Centrino logo in the Other results, though.

It did great with QRCode too, but those were already easy to read. It's faster with Barcode Scanner.

Desperately awaiting an API.

getting someone's number at a bar will be so much easier.

EDIT: since people post so many pics of themselves on facebook under all sorts of lighting conditions and angles, that might actually make face recognition somewhat feasible from a cell phone cam. of course, efficiently searching thru a corpus of millions of faces (each taken at several different angles) is an enormous technical challenge. i envision some app like Shazam being developed to recognize faces rather than songs ...

He told me that they built it from scratch and did not use OpenCV. Some parts were even written in assembly.

Im pretty sure that this is the only web application that I use that has had major parts of it written in assembly.

But for assembly optimization it is really not as useful as it used to be. Scalability is more about how to get sub-linear time complexity and efficient communication pattern. Nowadays c compiler can get fairly good assembly code and for low level optimization, human cannot compete with machine (how many people knows the particular cache line alignment trick on old core i7?). Multimedia instructions (SSE/MMX/3D Now) are useful but most of them can be done by function call instead of hand-crafted assembly.

There was research cited here a while ago on the high accuracy obtained by constraining the search space to within one's social graph (hundreds vs millions). While it might not identify the stranger at the bar, it might identify their companions and so on. Six degrees of separation in real-time.

I anticipate a video version of this soon.

http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/#place

But as per the other response here, I'm not sure it's using the video so much as the location and orientation to deliver results.

I'd like to see a version, like the still-photos, whereby the search engine is translating in real time as new objects enter the frame.

While I'm at it, I'd like it to perform these tasks with a T-800-style HUD.

Droid indeed.

I dont see how the landmark recognition feature could be useful. If you have a camera + 3g on your phone, you have a GPS.