Goggles
Posted by
Russ Abbott on
Dec 20, 2009; 10:33pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Goggles-tp4196185.html
Have you heard about Google's Goggles?
This is from the NYTimes
story.
Goggles
allows users to search the Web, not by typing or by speaking keywords,
but by snapping an image with a cellphone and feeding it into Google’s
search engine.
How tall is that mountain on the horizon? Snap and get
the answer. Who is the artist behind this painting? Snap and find out.
What about that stadium in front of you? Snap and see a schedule of future
games there.
Goggles, in essence, offers the promise to bridge the gap
between the physical world and the Web.
It's not in the iPhone store (yet?).
It's available for Android phones.
This strikes me as a great example of
the subtle development of a platform-like mechanism.
PDAs and then cellphones have had the
ability to take pictures for a long time. But recently that capability
has begun to be used for far more than taking pictures. The other day I
heard a report of an iPhone app that lets you use the iPhone camera as
a magnifying glass. Run the app and hold the lens over something you want
to see, and it appears enlarged on the screen. (I don't have the
app and can't say how well it works. But it certainly seems feasible.)
The Google Goggles application uses the picture-taking capability
to convey information from the phone to Google's image database and image
recognition software. It's the first step in giving a phone the ability
to see in some reasonable sense.
All that's really neat, but the point
I want to make here is that
- It wouldn't have happened if
cellphones didn't have a basic picture taking capability -- which require
the existence of a lens and imaging hardware/software.
- Once that equipment was in place,
people started to find new ways to make use of it. It is, in effect, becoming
part of the infrastructure of the hand-held device and not "just"
a way to take pictures. It has moved from a stove-piped capability to
a platform capability.
- It wouldn't have happened if
the device within which this imaging capability is embedded weren't programmable
-- and available to be programmed by external entities.
So this is a nice current concrete real-life
illustration of how a platform/infrastructure element becomes established.
In this case the mechanism of establishment was not the explicit decision
by someone to make imaging part of the platform. Presumably, cellphones
were equipped with lenses and imaging software simply because it was a
competitive necessity, not because anyone thought anything additional would
come of it. Yet something additional is coming of it. So what's important
is to understand what was needed so that more could be made of the basic
imaging capability than just the original "requirement" to be
able to take pictures.
We should keep that in mind when developing any system. Having a system that only meets the requirements
is not enough. Systems should be open enough so that they can be expanded
in unanticipated ways. This is a nice illustration of how that works.
-- Russ
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