The future of maps

Blaise Aguera y Arcas (architect at Microsoft Live Labs, architect of Seadragon, and the co-creator of Photosynth) gave a talk at TED where he detailed the future of maps online and even their use in augmented reality.

The impressive demo saw him ‘walk’ around the virtual world that Microsoft has managed to map, able to look around in full 3d and even go inside buildings.

There was impressive integration with Flickr whereby the application can integrate peoples pictures from Flickr and overlay them on the 3d world you are currently looking at, enabling you to see what the person saw when they took the picture.

Perhaps the most impressive piece of the talk was when they were inside a building and there was a team with a backpack camera at the same location, the application was able to live stream what the group of people where seeing with their backpack camera and impose that atop of the 3d view inside the building and provide a real time view whilst still in perspective of what was happening in the place.

There is also tight integration of world wide telescope, you are able to just gaze up at the sky and then an accurate representation of the stars is revealed, you can scrub the time of day and watch the night sky change, or even zoom into the moon,

Checkout the video below to see it all in action: