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Google Goggles might meld with your default Android camera app

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If we’re lucky, Google might decide to ditch Google Goggles, an app that identifies information seen through the camera in your phone. Rumors indicate that the tech giant is well on its way to creating an app that combines Google Camera with Google Goggles. Essentially making sure you can use company’s in-house camera app to also identify the objects around you, all by going through the company’s “Visual Search” technology.

Google Goggles is one of the company’s in-house developed hidden gems that’s available on the Play Store. Users can start up the app and identify different objects and texts in the real world through the camera lens. It can also be used to find similar objects to the one you’ve analyzed, it then searches through the Google database for images similar to the one you’ve taken. It’s used both to get extra information on objects around you. If you feel like it’s time to check the integrity of a text it also lets you scan a whole text and provides a link to the original article. You can also crop the portion of the image you want to analyze before analyzing an object, it helps the app determine what you’re really interested in.

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Integrating Goggles into Android’s default camera app would likely make the original app feel obsolete. While useful in some contexts it’s used so rarely that you’ll likely just do a web search rather than use the app, simply because it’s not used very often. Today it’s possible to have Goggles activate every time you take a photo, but who wants to get an annoying notifier of similar objects for every image when they’re on a photo spree?

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But rather than doing a four-corner crop of an object, the new integration would allow you to simply draw on the screen with your finger to choose what you want to analyze. A more intuitive method, you might argue, and combining it with the accessibility of your camera might just be the boost that the technology behind Goggles has always needed. Supposedly, all of this would be complemented by deeplink, meaning it would immediately show you possibly relevant information to your whatever you’ve marked on the screen. Marking can be done either before or after the photo is taken.

These rumors also suggest that the technology is being tested with a “wearable computing device.” This indicates either integration with the company’s rumored AR/VR headset, which is said to be launched this September, or with Google Glass.

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Dan Isacsson
Dan Isacsson
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Being a gamer since the age of three, Dan took an interest in mobile gaming back in 2009. Since then he's been digging ever…
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