EZ Identification

A picture is worth a thousand words they say. The act of snapping a photo and uploading it with a click or two can quickly outpace a typed out text message. On a tangent of sorts, I'm reminded of how Ventrilo for online gaming is relatively painless compared to conversing with teammates by typing.

Some of the most practical uses seemed to boil down to using a photo to ask, "Can you identify this?"

• The apprentice handyman wants to know what this part came from and where a reliable replacement can be found.
• The apprentice astronomer wants to know what constellation they see in the sky.
• The apprentice ornithologist wants to know what that bird perched in front of them is.
• The apprentice entomologist wants to know what that bug buzzing in front of them is.
• The apprentice botanist wants to know what plant this leaf or seed came from.
• The apprentice survivalist wants to know if that plant is poisonous or edible.
• The hypochondriac wants to know if this looks infected and will be told that they should be seeing a doctor instead.

We all want a Pokedex.

The problem with multimedia is extracting useful data from it. The simple solution is to let the masses organize it by crowd-sourcing the tags and responses. The advanced solution is to let a computer do it all, but computers aren't necessarily good at that sort of thing.

If stage one hinges on ubiquitous digital cameras and wireless internet. Then stage two would require perfecting image and video recognition algorithms.