The entry point to search
On page 177 of his best-selling book The Search the author John Battelle envisions a scenario of the ubiquos entry for search for the search economy. The vision is a barcde scanner enabled PDA which as an example reads the barcodes in a wine store, queries Google and returns a price comparison list combined with the closest shops.
With computer vision it might be possible to identify the object by its looks, rather than by a barcode. (The latter would also require some unified barcode system for all stores etc - to my knowledge some barcodes are global, but many are defined individually on a per retailer basis). The the object itself would serve as query! In the case of the wine store it would be the bottle with its label. You would take a picture of the object in question, an object recognition system, would recognise it and return the requested answer. (price comparison, ingredients or whatever). To limit the search space a multi-modal search combined with gps could be done. (i.e. if by gps you know that in the area of the query there is a wine store you can restrict the bottles to wine bottles). That’s why I initiated the student project mobileOR .