Thinking out loud or “what stops progress?”

I'm not a very smart person. I have no achievements in the field of web design or in marketing. Even my work is not very original. I am sure that most of you are talented people who have achieved much more in life than your humble servant. But for some reason even I, a simple inhabitant of this planet, sometimes see things as they could be.
“Why haven't they done it yet?” - I ask myself. I have no answer ...

I do not flatter myself, I think many of you have already thought, or thought about what I am going to voice: the ideas are simple. But why no one has yet implemented it is not clear.

For example, I think many of you have seen the video in the category “The Future is Here”, in which the actor directs a multifunctional PDA to a building and receives information on this building, a 3d model and so on. I then thought: these guys are able to look for ideas. Indeed, very few people could come up with such a service. What does it really become very convenient and popular. I deliberately use the word "become" and not "can become." It is obvious.
')


But this service has not yet been implemented, although the implementation is not so difficult as it seems at first glance.
Let's look at what we need in order to make such a reality.
First: we need the ability to recognize the building on the phone. This stage seems to be the most difficult, but given the modern development of technology and common sense, we will refute this assertion. The main thing is not to be afraid and think in stages.
Let's try to present the structure of what we saw as if it worked:

1) Data reading (photo, streaming video).
2) Sending data to the server for processing.
3) Actually processing.
4) Receive data from the server.

We all know that in the current age of marketing gimmicks, almost every camera has a mobile phone with the ability to access the Internet, a mobile phone has a camera, and access to the Internet. Many cities are covered with 3G, or even WiMAX. Almost everywhere there is access to the Internet via GPRS or EDGE. By reducing these two straight lines, we can conclude that sending a non-heavy photo to the server will work almost everywhere. And under certain conditions - you can send streaming video. Or instead of streaming video - a cycle of images.

Suppose the first and second points of our very simple plan are fulfilled: we can transmit information to the server. But why server photos? I think the most shrewd ones understood this from the very beginning and I distract them with my troubles, but be patient a little.

All of you know the IT industry giant Google. Many of you choose his search engine as the main one. All of you are attracted by the rich functionality and convenient search. As well as the constant development of the project. Adding new features and capabilities. And this is cool.
So here. Google has one great service Similar Images . I think he is familiar to many of you, and you even used it many times. For the rest I will explain: this service is looking for similar images. You can follow the link and look at the information on this service in more detail. Well, while I return to our sheep.

We turn to point three. Suppose we send photos, and then what? We can take a picture of the building from different positions and transfer the photos to the server, where each photo is assigned a label, for example, the “Leaning Tower”. Simple enough. Each building has a separate label. You ask: “What is the use of this? It is impossible to photograph from all angles. ” And you will be right. Really impossible to take a picture from all sides. But we already know that there are different mechanisms for image recognition. Having a recognition engine available, and a large number of photos, we can recognize any photo of a building made by any device as a photo of this building. There is a question of filling.

By itself, the question of filling the base of buildings (even if it will be only buildings, for a start) seems very ambitious and complex. After all, it is necessary to hire a huge number of operators and database fillers, where information on objects will be stored.
Indeed, very difficult. And expensive. Especially if we forget about the fact that quite a large number of people live on our planet who are ready to help this project for free if they see its prospects.
Tell me honestly, you would have photographed a monument in your city, and your house? After all, it is absolutely not difficult and not expensive - to take two or three photos and send them to the server with minimal comments. And if every tenth of billions of Internet users takes two or three photos of an architectural monument, or just at home, we will have a fairly large collection of images with tags. Seems not bad.

Naturally, at first, the organizer will have to fill most of the especially large and popular buildings in order to add enthusiasm to ordinary users, but then ordinary people will continue to do this! ..

The final scheme will look like this: a person sends a camera to a building and takes a photo (or a cycle of photos), the program sends them to the server for comparison, gets the result, sorts similar pictures by relevance and selects the most similar ones. Next comes the reading of the tag from the photo and the search for information in the database, after which the data is sent back to the client. Everything is very simple. And very usable.

Of course, this is all a cost. This and the necessary software for mobile phones, with which you can call the camera function, take a picture, send a picture to the server and get a response. This is the initial cost. This is the power of servers for information processing. But what a prospect! This is a real, useful function, and not marketers sucking the last juices out of their finger.

The prospects are many. For example, the promotion of a mobile OS in which this function is conveniently implemented.

But it is very difficult to understand why this has not yet been implemented. After all, the idea is not complicated. The implementation - for some major player like Google - too. Maybe someone deliberately slows down, that would give it out when the rest of the marketers tricks end? But if you stand aside - someone can realize it before? What do you think?

PS I am not an editor or a proofreader. I'm not even a journalist. So if you find any grammatical or stylistic errors in my text - be sure to notify me through the PM. Thanks in advance =)