The future's bright, the future's....augmented?

Since it first came out i've always said that Google Earth (or rather Google Maps at first) was undoubtedly my favourite thing about the internet, for someone like me it was an absolute godsend and I remember how things were before then....I didn't know where anything or anywhere was. ok ok....so I still don't know where anything is, but to have this photographic map of where you need to go is brilliant and i've used it many times in the past to help me with directions, etc.

It was around this time last year that I heard about the street view feature, it completely blew me away....and still continues to do so....but my brother showed me something just the other day which boggles the mind even further.

Those of you who keep up with the latest gadgets and software, etc. will know of something called 'Photosynth', this is a piece of software that came out a few years ago which retrieves photos from sites like Flickr and puts them together like a jigsaw puzzle to give a full 3D representation of the subject. For instance, say you did a search for "Eiffel tower"....all the photos tagged with that location are pulled by the software and put together in way that the whole image is in (almost) complete allignment.
Anyhoos....Bing (one of the other major search engines) has created their own 'Virtual Earth' and incorporated this Photosynth technology into it, so what this means is that you can zoom into the street view and see photos that people have tagged of that area....perfectly alligned with the street view background. In essence it is basically a personalised map of the entire world.

The initial layout of the maps are at an isometric viewpoint, which compared to 'Sim City' is meant to make it much easier for users to add their own 3D models to the maps. Similar to 'Google Earth' they also have a star chart present, but here it is interactive aswell....a simple tilt towards the sky in street view changes the photographic light blue sky to a deep array of star patterns; all in the exact position where they are in the sky at that particular moment in time.
I previously mentioned the inclusion of 'Photosynth' technology, but what really makes this such a groundbreaking program is the integration of live video into the scene as you are browsing the map.



This was the presentation for it, skip to about 2:50 and wait until he phones his friends on their mobile......this will blow you away.




It's evident just looking at this that augmented reality (a phrase that i'd never heard of until last month) is going to play a major role in future technology, perhaps in some ways a very unstable one, but the rate of improvement I find quite unbelieveable.
There are some companys incorporating augmented reality into their products already but I think that some aren't really getting it, namely the recent release of Adidas' augmented reality trainer....which seems to have had very little thought put into the practability of it. But in the main it's good to see that the big players are putting some serious thought into how it could improve current technology.

....but is it all a good thing? ....this is just the beginning, we don't really know the full potential of it. Let's just see how the next 10 years pan out.

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