Researchers at MOBVIS project are working on a pattern-recognition system that allows you to take a picture of a building on your mobile and have the software identify where you are and what you’re looking at:
…the genius of the system boils down to a higher-dimension, feature-matching algorithm developed by the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, one of the partners of the project. It can very accurately detect minute but telling differences between similar objects, such as buildings or monuments, both by the appearance of the buildings themselves and their context in the streetscape.
Apparently the system gets it right about 80% of the time.
This is great. We are at the beginning of a true information revolution. A picture is worth a thousand words, literally. Soon, computing will be a much more visually interactive experience. The tipping point will come when it becomes something you don’t even need to think about
you need to take panoramic pictures before you even start using this (they mention google street view, but even google street view doesn’t have all the places covered and they never showed that it works with google street too), expecting that people will take pictures and upload them is just naive
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