Famous XKCD Comic Comes Full Circle With AI Bird-Identifying Binoculars
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last week, Austria-based Swarovski Optik introduced the AX Visio 10x32 binoculars, which the company says can identify over 9,000 species of birds and mammals using image recognition technology. The company is calling the product the world's first "smart binoculars," and they come with a hefty price tag -- $4,799. "The AX Visio are the world's first AI-supported binoculars," the company says in the product's press release. "At the touch of a button, they assist with the identification of birds and other creatures, allow discoveries to be shared, and offer a wide range of practical extra functions." The binoculars, aimed mostly at bird watchers, gain their ability to identify birds from the Merlin Bird ID project, created by Cornell Lab of Ornithology. As confirmed by a hands-on demo conducted by The Verge, the user looks at an animal through the binoculars and presses a button. A red progress circle fills in while the binoculars process the image, then the identified animal name pops up on the built-in binocular HUD screen within about five seconds. In 2014, a famous xkcd comic strip titled Tasks depicted someone asking a developer to create an app that, when a user takes a photo, will check whether the user is in a national park (deemed easy due to GPS) and check whether the photo is of a bird (to which the developer says, "I'll need a research team and five years"). The caption below reads, "In CS, it can be hard to explain the difference between the easy and the virtually impossible." It's been just over nine years since the comic was published, and while identifying the presence of a bird in a photo was solved some time ago, these binoculars arguably go further by identifying the species of the bird in the photo (it also keeps track of location due to GPS). While apps to identify bird species already exist, this feature is now packed into a handheld pair of binoculars.
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