[gcb0]

> Point it down the street to have great restaurants highlighted?

on android early on (before 2.3!) yelp called it lens, and had a monocle icon. google maps and nokia apps also had it at some point I think. and no better implementation will ever make it less useless.

it was a uter useles gimmick. everyone tried it exactly once.

[drusepth]

It's actually coming back in Android O as "Google Lens". [1] Highlights include identifying trees/flowers in view, automatically connecting to Wifi by pointing at the sticker on a router, and pulling up a business listing and ratings by pointing at a building.

Apparently it'll be a part of Google Camera, but also baked into the Assistant so you can take pictures within the context of your conversation to "show" the assistant things, clarify what you're talking about, or ask for more information about something unknown.

Can also apparently integrate with your other Google services, with one example given as pointing your phone at a theater marquee, it pulling up ticket prices for you, and you saying "add this to my calendar".

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/17/google-lens-will-let-smart...

[calvin_c]

It was on one of the early versions of the Yelp iOS app as well. Don't really remember if it was there on day one, but I remember playing around with it in iOS 2 or 3.

[falsedan]

It was called Monocle, and it's still there, under More (on the version of the app I have installed).

[mavhc]

The ones I tried in olden times just used GPS and orientation to overlay geodata, camera input wasn't used