Right now, Google Goggles is a neat show-off application for your Android device but the search giant has big plans for the visual search engine.
“Goggles is not just an app – it’s a platform,” Goggles product manager Shailesh Nalawadi told Techradar. “Yes, we do plan to open up the platform as an API but are not sure what the platform should be … I’m interested in understanding from developers what are the features and capabilities of Goggles that would be good to expose.”
This should mean that ambitious developers will be able to create interesting apps while Google takes care of the heavy computational lifting in the cloud. Who knows? If you’re like Plink and make something cool with visual search, you just may get acquired by the search juggernaut.
Nalawadi said the company has big ambitions for Goggles and the success of this visual search engine could be a boon for effective augmented reality. There are a few hurdles to overcome before this happens, though.
“To solve augmented reality, you need to have an extremely accurate location,” said Nalawadi. “The current method of extraction from handsets are really insufficient and in my view it leads to a poor user experience where you’re looking in this direction and the app thinks you’re looking over there – we really need to crack that nut before augmented reality apps become interesting.”
Check out IntoMobile putting Goggles through the paces in the video below. As you can see, it still needs a lot of work but is a potentially powerful way to search.
[Via Techradar]