The future of Maps...

Augmented reality is one of those phrases that is used a lot by techies, but depending on who you ask or where you are, it can mean almost anything. What I understand is that the general idea is that there is “more than what meets the eye.” (e.g. you can see a restaurant, but augmented reality can show you reviews or the best dishes to eat there.)

Ultimately, it has the potential to make life a lot more interesting. Just as the Internet brought about a revolution of knowledge, augmented reality is probably the next step.

Check out Bing Maps. I recommend having Silverlight installed (not much point otherwise). Now… start zooming in. Click the blue person and go down to ’street view’. Quite good, but nothing extraordinary. Now click ‘Map Apps’ à ‘Streetside Photos.’ You’ll see photos from Flickr superimposed on the street view and, as you can see with my photo above, there’s historical imagery available too. There’s plenty of other Map Apps that can entertain for hours… Impressed? Well, I’m just basically covering what  Blaise Aguera y Arcas at the TED convention said last week (video embedded below). For me,  it’s really exciting – click around on the Silverlight version of Bing Maps, and if you’re not suitably impressed, just watch the video to get an idea of what’s to come ( it gets really interesting at around three minutes in). Practically, the talk was just a demonstration of things to come – if it is MS or Google, it really doesn’t matter, the important thing is that it happens and that there are investments made to bring this technology to a broad audience and make it available to the internet audience. However, saying that, what Blaise showed at TED has not yet been seen in this fluid fully-integrated form from Google.

Now, many of you will probably thinking (and rightly so) that Google has had the vision for sometime. People accuse MS of simply buying/copying ideas, but the reality is that Google bought both GoogleEarth and Google Maps from other companies. They certainly were not the first to use panoramic imagery. You’ll notice on that link to the TED talk that a lot of people are commenting that Microsoft has a long way to go before they catch up with Google’s Street View coverage. True, but on the other hand Microsoft has been collecting aerial imagery for a lot longer and Google is going to have to catch up there. So, it’s not surprising then that Microsoft has managed to design an astonishing device to rediscover our planet, our countries, our cities, and so on.

Stay tuned to DigiLounge for the latest tech news and updates!