But with the technology Google has licensed from SRI, image stabilization will no longer be a concern ... at least on Android. Google is implementing the SRI tech in its Google Talk application, to deliver better video on Android 3.0+ devices. And that may be only the beginning of Google's computer vision plans.

Image stabilization technology is over 20 years old, with initial applications built for defense use by DARPA. The technology was crucial to autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles and robotics. Someone driving a tank, for example, would get nauseous in 2 minutes if it weren't for stabilization technologies, Winarsky says.

But these days, the tech has made its way into more benign, consumer-facing efforts, like Google Talk, apparently. Here, the video chatting application captures the video from a device's front-facing camera and compresses the data before transmission. In the compression algorithms, the amount of bandwidth used increases with the amount of motion in a scene.

By stabilizing the video, SRI's software allows the compression to take up fewer bits. Simply put, it's more efficient. It takes less work and fewer resources.

What Could Google Do, Post-Video Stabilization?

Although SRI can't talk for Google or about its future plans in this area, saying only that it "fully hopes to work beyond this app with Google," Winarsky was happy to talk in more general terms about where computer vision technologies are headed.

Once you have the stabilization down, he says, you can then work on things like tracking objects that appear in the frame, tracking the motion of objects and recognizing those objects. Head tracking, for example, was demonstrated at this year's Google I/O where the stabilization technology was used in conjunction with a face-tracking API (application programming interface) that will arrive in a future version of Google's mobile operating system Android.

Put it all together - stabilization, image tracking and image recognition - and you have "augmented reality" (AR), a term that describes technology that lets your device "see" the world in front of its camera lens and then act on that data in some way.

Google, of course, is already experimenting with AR to some extent through its "Google Goggles" application which lets you use pictures to search the Web. Google Goggles can currently identify things like landmarks, books, art, wine and logos, but has recently started recognizing text, too, in order to perform on-the-fly translations between languages.

Facial Recognition in Video?

There are other things that stabilization can help to enable, says Winarsky. For example, facial recognition. Until an image is stabilized, such a thing would not be possible on video. After stabilization though, the same type of algorithms that currently work on still images could be applied to moving video.

Google already uses facial recognition in its online photo-sharing service Picasa (soon to be rebranded as "Google Photos"), so it's not a big leap to assume that Google could introduce something like that to its video applications and services someday. Facial recognition in Google Talk? YouTube? Google Goggles? Who knows?

Case in point: earlier this year, Google denied that it has a facial recognition app in development, after CNN published a report to the contrary, including an on-record statement from a Google employee confirming its existence.  And Google recently rolled out a smart update to search that allows you to search for things using only an image. And guess what? It works for images of people, too.

So why not make people chatting with you on video, seen through your camera lens or those appearing in online videos "Googleable" objects? There's only one reason not to: it's a little creepy. But creepy/awesome is the line Google likes to toe. For the company, it's not a matter of if something is possible - it's only a matter of when is the right time to release it.

Stabilization, on its own, may seem like minor news, but it's an important first step towards a future where the world itself, and all the people in it, are things you can Google just by looking at them.

With Cloud, there is no desktop. You turn on your computer and it boots up to a Google Chrome web browser page which includes a dock of application shortcuts similar to what you would see on an Apple PC. Introduced at the recent Netbook World Summit in Paris, this simplified "OS" is an ideal install for the new ultraportable notebook computers called "netbooks," according to the company, as it is both fast and lightweight. It really is a true netbook, after all - it embodies the name in a way that none of the other netbook operating systems do.

However, unlike the various Linux-based netbook operating systems out there, including Good OS's failed "gOs" that was installed on the now-discontinued gPCs, Cloud OS does not intend to replace Windows. Instead, it runs alongside it. Presenting a hybrid approach to computing, Cloud gives you quick access to a number of web apps directly from the dock, including Google's Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Docs, Blogger, and YouTube, which you can launch alongside other rich client applications like Skype.

When you need to do heavier lifting, which on a netbook probably means running Microsoft Office, you can switch over to Windows or whatever OS may be running. (Cloud is compatible with all operating systems, says Good OS).

Cloud: OS or PXE?

If Cloud was installed on a traditional laptop or desktop, on the other hand, it would be akin to the Preboot Execution Environments (PXEs) installed on consumers PCs. It is in these PXEs that we may initially test the waters of a cloud OS's potential. Take for example Dell's forthcoming Latitude ON: a  Linux-based system-on-a-chip that consists of a low-power ARM processor and flash memory running independently of the laptop's CPU and hard disk drive. With it, you'll be able to launch a Firefox-based browser, web mail, calendar, and contacts application as well as a Microsoft Office and PDF viewer. Cloud OS is merely an alternative to that software, albeit without the Microsoft Office/PDF support.

But is a PXE really the Cloud OS of our dreams? In our imaginations, at least, there was no app that still required the computing power of the desktop. Is that ever going to be a reality?

Do We Really Want or Need a Cloud OS?

Today's computer users may not need to run as many desktop applications as they did in the past, but there are still several apps whose cloud versions exist only as lightweight counterparts to the real deal. Adobe's Photoshop is a great example of this - although there are several web based photo-editing apps, most would argue that they don't compare in either features or richness to their desktop counterpart. Then there is, of course, the staple: Microsoft Office. It will soon come in a web-flavored version called Microsoft Office Web Applications, but will it really replace the desktop software entirely? Even more, do we want it to?

As we transition to the cloud, we're seeing more attempts at merging the online and offline worlds. Adobe gave us AIR apps, which can be designed to run in offline mode, syncing data back to their various motherships when your internet connection returns. Google delivered Google Gears, a simple yet somewhat clunky implementation that takes web apps offline. Why clunky? Gears doesn't automatically detect a lost connection, you see. (Switch off your Wi-Fi and see what Google Reader does. Oops, an error occurred, it will say.) Instead, using Gears means you must first click the provided button or link which saves the data to your computer for offline viewing. If it wasn't for the syncing it offered, this wouldn't be much more of an improvement over the good ol' "make this web page available offline" trick.

The Drawback to the Cloud OS: An Offline World

So far, these hybrid approaches to dealing with the cloud seem to imply that we're not entirely ready for a complete transition. Internet is not everywhere yet, unfortunately. So where does that leave our hopes for a true cloud OS? Do we first need ubiquitous broadband and Wi-Fi before a cloud OS can become a reality?  Or will we one day surf a free second internet provided by Google? Is Google right now perfecting a hybrid OS in secret? Whatever the case, despite its name, Cloud OS doesn't feel like like the cloud-based OS we dreamed of, but it may be a good first step in that direction.