Awesome, or scary? I vote awesome!
By Latasia Brown
This week, the genius mad scientists from Google have unveiled the most awesome app! It enables your phone to perform visual searches. That’s right! VISUAL SEARCHES. You can take a picture of a book and search for a review or the bio of the author who wrote it. Traveling to a foreign country and don’t know what restaurants to choose? Simple. Pan your phone’s camera over the restaurants’ storefronts and the names will pop up at the bottom. Select one via your touch screen and view their contact info, menu items and even reviews.
At this point, using search engines via images is in its infancy. So it doesn’t work so well with items like food, cars, animals or nature right now. But just think: one day you’ll be able to take a picture of a tree and the search results will tell you the type of tree you’re looking at, where they’re found, etc. And the same can be said for animals, cars and other arenas. The possibilities are limitless! Let’s hope it’s never programmed to search people via their faces … that’d be a little scary.
Here’s a video by Google showcasing this new app.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hhgfz0zPmH4However, there is a teensy catch: The app is only available on the Android phone. So all of you with Androids out there, kudos! For the rest of us, I’d give it a few months or so and we should be in the loop too (grin). Good thing technology moves fast these days.
Now if only we could all get personal Rosies from the Jetsons … (daydreaming sigh) one day.