SIVAPRASAD

LONDON: Soon, you won’t have to go through the painstaking and irritating task of searching for your missing car keys, thanks to “Smart Goggle”, whi
ch can track down any misplaced item. A team of Japanese scientists, led by Yasuo Kuniyoshi at the Tokyo University School of Information Science and Technology, has come up with a secretive artificial intelligence project codenamed Smart Goggle, which they claim can help search anything from a remote control, to mobile phone or iPod. According to the scientists, one just needs to tell the glasses what he or she is searching for. Following the voice command, the Smart Goggle plays into their eye a video of the last few seconds they saw that missing item. A small camera rests on the glasses making constant record of everything the wearer sees. The tiny display inside the glasses spots what is being checked and a small readout immediately announces what the computer thinks the object most likely is. Professor Kuniyoshi said that the extraordinary property of the glasses doesn’t lie in its hardware, but the computer algorithm that allows the goggles to know instantly what they are seeing. He said that if the wearer roams around the house for about an hour telling the goggles the name of everything from a coathanger to the kitchen sink, they would retain the information. And if at some point in the future, the wearer asks them where they last saw a particular item, they will play the suitable footage, reports Times Online . Kuniyoshi describes his goggles as the ultimate link between the real world and the cyber world and maintains that his invention could finally be loaded with vast quantities of data from the internet. With the huge database installed, the glasses might actually know much more about what the wearer is seeing than the wearer himself - species of animal, technical specifications of vehicles and electronics, or even the identity of people. In a demonstration, the professor showed how the user might, for example, gaze at a selection of unknown flowers and the glasses would say which were begonias, which were ferns and which were pansies. Although the experimental model is still too bulky for daily use, the team at the Tokyo University School of Information Science and Technology are confident that it can soon be miniaturised. It could even, they suggest, be small enough to look little different from a normal pair of glasses. But unfortunately, of course, there is one irritating question they would not be able to answer: “Now where did I put my glasses?”