A new patent filing by Google indicates that the Search giant may soon be able to make your entire life searchable. According to the patent, Google’s technology allows video recording of real life events through devices like the Google Glass, which will then be sent to a paired phone and subsequently to a server for storage purposes. This enables Google to form a collection of real life videos that the company can then make searchable through relevant queries. So, you can make a search like ‘My 20th birthday’ and Google will bring out the videos from that day.
Explaining the Search functionality, the patent reads, “the method may also include transmitting a query of the user to the server computer system to initiate a search of the history or real-world experiences, and receiving results relevant to the query that include data indicative of the media data in the history of real-world experiences.”
Further, the patent also indicates that there will be functionality for automatically recording videos when users are at known historical monuments or other popular location. It says that a popular location would be determined based on data that has been accumulated from other users. According to the patent, “When the user is determined to be within a popular location, preference manager may automatically turn on media capture without intervention of a user. In another embodiment, preferences manager, may be set to continuously or periodically capture media data for a specific interval of time.”
While the concept does sound revolutionary and a lot of users may be looking forward to it, there are hurdles that Google will have to get over if and when it brings it to a consumer level. The most important of these would most likely be privacy. That said, apps like Google photos, Apple’s Photos app and many others already save videos to cloud services. This makes it evident that users are already willing to save their personal videos to the cloud.
Storing videos on the cloud does have other challenges also. For example, the quality of videos that are stored on the cloud will be a problem, since Google will most likely have to compress them. So, if you’re shooting all your videos on 4K, you may be disappointed by Google compressing them.