Great geriatric aid! Talking to an old acquaintance at a Christmas party and
can't remember their name. Just sneakily take their picture and Goggle will
print out their name AND the last three things you talked about.
n
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe]
----- Original Message -----
From: Russ Abbott
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Sent: 12/20/2009 3:34:50 PM
Subject: [FRIAM] Goggles
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 Googles 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
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
