What If You Could Google Objects, Not Just Words?

Right now, you can google any word or combination of words. But what if you could google actual things or objects?

UK designer Callum Peden has come up with a product idea for Google. It's just an idea, but a really good one.Called "Google Vision," the concept involves a gadget about the size of a cell phone with built-in GPS that scrolls out to reveal a flexible screen. Its purpose would be to use image recognition and GPS data to tell you what you're looking at.

The image would be compared against a database of objects known to be near the physical location identified by the GPS electronics.

The only "downside" is that physical objects would need to be indexed somehow. The best way to do this would be via a Wiki somehow -- it would require volunteers with digital cameras taking pictures and feeding them to the image recognition database, along with GPS coordinates -- a kind of Wikipedia for images.

Come to think of it, the Wikipedia itself would be ideal for this, because entries already have pictures.

What's great about this idea is that all the technology needed to build it already exists. Somebody (Hi, Google!) would need only to buy the parts and put them all together.