We live in a world where not a day goes by that some company announces a new and improved thing that hopes to revolutionize the world. A lot of these products tend to fall by the wayside as either novelty or just plain gimmicks–but sometimes a tech advancement comes along that seems really promising. Google’s new “Google Lens” feels like it’s going to be one that sticks around.

Google announced the new feature during their annual developer conference, Google I/O. The video explains that Google Lens is a set of vision-based computing capabilities that allows your phone to see the world and help you recognize the things in it. Basically, it’s the video game heads-up display we’ve always wanted!

At this time, the technical specs of how it works haven’t been made public, but we can assume it’s at least similar to Samsung’s Bixby assistant introduced on the Galaxy S8. We’re guessing a major factor of the Google Lens’ recognition software has to do with the years of data Google has compiled in terms of their reverse image searches and has probably got some of the bones of their previous foray into image recognition, Google Goggles. This means that–with the bevy of information Google has at its fingertips–you point your camera at something and Google Lens will do its best to identify what you’re looking at.

With Google Lens, your smartphone camera won’t just see what you see, but will also understand what you see to help you take action. #io17 pic.twitter.com/viOmWFjqk1

— Google (@Google) May 17, 2017

Google Lens will also be able to recognize the facade of businesses (probably aided by dipping into your phone’s GPS info) in order to return search results. The demo also showed the system recognizing and reading text on buildings regardless of the signage font. We wouldn’t be surprised if this has something to do with all those CAPTCHA things we’ve filled out over the years.

What do you think of Google Lens? Let’s discuss in the comments below!

Image: Google