Google ready to conquer Augmented Reality with “Goggles”

As AR enthusiasts you might have known before, too. But it’s worth a note! Google has finally come up with their own AR setup for mobile phones, well of course for android powered devices. It’s called goggles and you can grab it from now on through the android marketplace on your phone.

You can either watch the fun concept video with some google engineers, probably from Germany and India for their strong accents ;-), explaining the whole idea – or you grab a copy from the market. (Unfortunately I don’t get it listed in Germany, anybody experienced the same?)

The cool feature besides the usual suspects of location based information using GPS and compass is a broad use of google’s own image search connected with additional information. This means you can “scan” a popular building or simply the cover of a book with your phone’s camera and you will get additional information displayed or propably offers to buy the item or reserve a table in that fancy restaurant above the clouds.

I’m having high hopes with google’s goggles. I have to admit regarding connectivity and usability google usually is pretty good with its concepts. Although the anaglyph glasses as a logo make me expect stereoscopic 3D for the information overlay… Well, maybe google is already working on that, too. Connect the Google HMD to your android and fire up goggles… So this could be the forecast for google entering AR market in 2010. Since the predictions listed by rouli on gamesalfresco already were beaten for 2009. ;-)