Perhaps you have spotted the adverts being beamed into Piccadilly Circus by interactive, hyperactive billboards; perhaps you have seen, firsthand, the technology in action on smaller, smartphone screens.
Either way, you’ll likely be seeing it soon: Google has made its Lens technology compatible with iOS, and revamped it for Android users, putting the smart viewer technology on early adopter’s agendas.
To explain, quickly: Google Lens is one of those sci-fi features that you swiftly either cannot live without or is a harbinger of impending doom — depending on your opinions on such matters.
Open the app and point the camera lens at anything around you — be it a wildflower (unlikely), a passage of foreign text (possible) or an item of clothing (now we’re talking). At the stroke of a button, the app will conjure an explanation, a translation or a price and stockist respectively.
There’s more utility to it than that, though. If you’re in a zeitgeist restaurant, point the camera at an item on the menu and the app will fluently summon an explanation of the menu item, and save your face in front of your dining companion (good for dates).
Frame a building in your viewfinder and conjure an explanation of its history — one suitably detailed to impress a wide-eyed visiting relative. Dogspotters: work out which breed you are cooing over on London Fields.
You can also copy and paste words to save time, pull up the opening hours of restaurants and shops, and point it at a wifi router’s label to automatically connect to the service — which is, even this cynic must say, pretty neat.
Google admits that its AI is still learning — the future is not, quite, fully operational. But Google Lens works fast and fluently — no interminable buffering here — and is getting cleverer by every second.
And if the flickering images in Piccadilly Circus — aka London’s prime advertising real estate — are anything to go by, the tech giant wants it to be one of its hero ventures of the future.
