Do you want to see something that makes Google Earth look like stone etchings?
Check out this talk from Ted2010, of the 3-D functionality in Bing Maps from Bing Maps’ Blaise Aguera y Arcas. This is far, far from using 3-D maps with the intent of simply finding your way around. It is closer than anything I have seen of a full 3-D representation of reality, and Aguera y Arcas emphasizes repeatedly that the overall purpose is geared towards weaving all available data about a location, from any available source, into the “picture”.
Bing Maps will incorporate metadata into potentially every aspect of what you see using cameras mounted on cars and back packs, but also user-generated content like images/video/blog posts/etc., etc. There’s “time travel” using photo archives, and accurate representations of celestial bodies. Augmented reality never seemed so…comprehensive.
It was similar to and every bit as elegant as Google Earth. Then they turned the real time video on.
The live video of Seattle’s Pike Place Market via 4G, on a moving screen within the view, floored me. It blew away lots of people watching the talk judging by the Ted audience response and naturally had me thinking of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. (Then I remembered that I first heard about that book at a bar within 40 feet of the fish tossers, all those years ago. Spooky! Forgive the digression.) Still, Snow Crash didn’t predict the way (potentially all) knowledge from totally decentralized info sources (ie potentially everyone with a camera, or any way to add content of any kind) would be integrated into these comprehensive windows onto the world.
One has to ask if Microsoft will find a way to let people without Internet Explorer use 3-D Bing Maps…
Anyway, don’t miss this video.
