Google Goggles

Google Goggles, sort of like beer goggles, but with a more reliable page rank for the visual target. ;-)

I wonder what sort of real time apps. could be build upon this technology. Especially interesting if the search results were incremental and personalised, and worked from a heads up display on a set of glasses. For instance, you could look up a person's Facebook details in real time as you talk to them. Shudder.

Ross

Augmented Virtuality for Processes

Google Earth with real time updates is now a possibility in the near future, with research being performed at Georgia Tech. A nice YouTube video is shown here of research into augmenting 3D Google Earth locations with camera updates, that are processed to show pedestrian and car movements in an area.

This is useful for showing process information updates in real time in a virtual setting.

We can now see that the various representation spaces for information: virtual world, image/video and augmented reality, seem to be heading towards a unified whole representation. Such a multi-space can be used to freely move in an out of 3D representations as we see fit, or to embed one within another - eg. Second Life as a 3D rendering on your physical desk using Augmented Reality technology.

So, the console view of your company's information, may indeed be spatially laid out in future, within a world visualisation like Google Earth.

Ross

I'm worried

Came across this visualisation in a blog to which I subscribe. This visualisation of the number of satellites around the Earth is an example of the emotional impact of particular visual representations. If you told me that there are thousands of satellites surrounding the Earth, then I might shudder a little. However, show me a visualisation like this and I will get nervous.

Yes, the scale is wrong, the pictures of the satellites are too big, and the number of satellites is trivial for the volume they occupy, but somehow I can't help but be a little nervous about having such devices above my head, along with the related navigation issues that this traffic jam presents for any spacecraft flying through the satellite cloud.

BTW, the visualisation looks good in the Google Earth web plugin.

Ross