Google Goggles & Project Natal: The Sixth Sense?

Google Goggles is a new initiative taken by Search engine team to make search even more user convenient and friendly. This service will allow end users to take real world pictures and generate a related Google Search. It will be a Visual Mobile Search (VMS) app developed for Android powered Smartphones.  This technology uses Visual recognition and Location based results to provide accurate results. CNBC covers a entertaining video about whats inside the Google visual project

There are couple of known apps which serve this visual search purpose on a smaller scale. One is SnapTell for music, movies, books and other one is PlinkArt for art searches. Now it will be interesting how Google implements Voice search technology on a large scale and how it competes with iPhone which has more than 100,000 apps in Apple Store.

On the other hand Microsoft is also working on Visual Computing projects at its research center. Microsoft Project named "Natal" is a XBox 360 platform for controller free gaming and entertainment.

Microsoft "Natal" to be launched in late 2010 will enable users with a natural interface control with gestures, voice commands or objects and images. However it may sound like something different as compared to Google Goggles but it is the same tree with two branches.

Microsoft Project "Natal" and Google Goggles initiative somehow replicates the TED Sixth Sense idea presented by Pranav Mistry. PhD student at MIT Pranav explains how he manages to converge the Real World objects to Digital World and vice versa. Mistry also explains that his project will be open source and would like end users to extend its open source capabilities.

It will be really interesting to see how these technologies are revolutionized by High Tech Companies like Google and Microsoft to change the future of Visual Computing and Image processing. This will conclude to an era where sixth sense will be a major contributor to worlds economy.