Google Goggles is officially dead Google wants you to take advantage of Lens' features instead. Moon Sponsored Links. In this article: app , gear , goggles , google , lens , mobile.
Google Google signed Goggles' death warrant the moment it launched Lens , and now it looks like the tech giant is ready to bid farewell to its old image recognition app. All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. I took some crappy pictures of stuff in my room with low light, and the app managed to get results in seconds. Club MacStories will help you discover the best apps for your devices and get the most out of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
Join the Club. Federico Viticci. He founded MacStories in April and has been writing about Apple since. They kept working on smartphones because smartphones worked. But practicality didn't matter to everyone. One former member of the Goggles team told me that in part, Google executives liked Goggles simply because it was "a whizzy demo. When Glass came along, promising not just camera-enabled search but a whole new kind of device and platform, Goggles paled in comparison.
Indeed, Glass was touted far beyond any other Google product before or since. In a remarkable video titled "One day Brin even took Glass to the TED conference in , passionately arguing for a future where gadgets free your eyes, hands, and ears rather than occupying them. Glass offered a complete and enticing view of the future, and inspired many inside and outside Google.
Never mind that the tech didn't really work. Pretty quickly, Nalawadi says, "I think the momentum shifted to project Glass. Some left Google altogether. At some point, Goggles just wasn't a thing anymore. By mid, nobody was left to even update the Android app.
Right as Google gave up on Goggles, other companies began to see value in the idea. Snapchat launched in as a tool for sending disappearing messages, but quickly embraced smartphone cameras as a powerful platform. Pinterest hinged on turning images into search queries; pin a chair you like, and Pinterest helped you decorate your house. For Apple, Facebook, and others, augmented reality shifted from sci-fi impossibility to near-future product.
Even within Google, the underlying technology wasn't going to waste. In fact, it was improving faster than ever. The first result of the shift: Google Photos, with its powerful search and assistive abilities. Here Google finally got to roll out its facial recognition, too.
After all these years, most of what held Goggles back has been solved. Smartphone cameras are excellent, as are the context-gathering sensors like gyroscopes and GPS that help anchor a user's position in the world. As a result, billions of users happily open their phone dozens of times a day to share memories, capture receipts, live-stream events, and save things to remember later. The back-end tech is faster, the front-end interfaces are easier.
Nobody's wearing face-puters yet, but users don't mind doing it on their phones. Goggles again, basically. Only this time it's called Lens. He gave demos: identifying a type of flower, or automatically connecting to Wi-Fi just by taking a picture of the username and password. So far, so Goggles. Including the fact that none of what worked in that video would be possible in the actual product anytime soon. Right now, Lens does the same things Goggles did in , only much faster.
It's easy to wonder if Google squandered a years-long advantage in thinking about how people might want to use their camera. A few people in the company understood that users might someday want to explore the world through the screen of their phone. They might want to point their phone at something to understand it better, and might want to overlay the digital world on top of the physical one.
Google may have known it first, but others beat it in the race to build something that captured the hearts and minds of users. Still, even if Google could have been earlier to the party, it's still not late. Google does have a huge set of intrinsic advantages, from its search-engine knowledge to its long history of collecting and personalizing data. And Google did learn a few lessons in the Goggles experiment.
This time, Lens won't be a standalone app. Instead, the tech will course through lots of Google products. It helps you grab phone numbers or restaurant info from any shot in Google Photos. Soon, it'll be part of Google Assistant, helping you search for anything you need any way you want.
Rather than make an app you may never open, Google's putting Lens everywhere you already, with the hope you'll discover it and use it. Google's made clear that Lens is a long-term bet for the company, and a platform for lots of use cases. Pichai compared Lens to Google's beginnings, how search was only possible because Google understood web pages.
Now, it's learning to understand the world. You can bet that next time Google tries to put a computer on your face, Lens will be there. That'll make for quite a demo. Call it the Unified Theory of Google Hardware.
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