Jonathan Dobres

Cower in terror at Retrievr, a super cool applet that searches a set of Flickr images based on what you draw. The doodle that accompanies this entry returned this landscape as the top result. Not too shabby. Retrievr’s visual acuity is still worse than any animal that possesses more than an eye spot, but it’s a nice start.

As computers become our personal media hubs and our image collections grow ever larger, keywords and categories may become insufficient to handle all the data. Drawing a smudge of color that resembles the picture you’re looking for strikes me as a great way to get the job done. Of course, then you get into all the problems that humans have remembering things accurately, but that’s a whole other issue. I, for one, welcome our visuo-droid overlords.