An idea for an interface for picture search

A few weeks ago I was a beer festival in Munich, and I was talking tosomeone who was working on something, hey it was a beer festival, but then Ihad an idea about the type of interface that might be really useful fordoing search. We now search for images using text, so somewhere someone hasto build the text to image representation of the images in their database.Arguably this is one area where tagging has made an enormous improvement,ala flickr, but it seems to me that if you could make an interface thatwould allow a user to either draw or assemble a rough draft of the imagethey were searching for then this might offer a powerful and complimentaryapproach. I envisage a system where people would be able to brig together acollage of elements, a car template that could be sized, coloured, a genericperson or child object. By arranging these elements on the search interfacethe seeker could give a lot more information in their search, vis a vis thespatial arrangement of elements.

Well this I heard that there are some people already working on this, Iguess that's not surprising, I hope that they can make it work, because itwould be really cool.

tags: search, image, tech