Slashdot Mirror
Bing Maps Wows 'Em At TED2010
theodp writes "In an eye-candy filled presentation that earned him a standing-O at TED2010, Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos augmented-reality mapping technology from Microsoft. In his eight minute spiel, an extension of a shorter tech preview video, the Bing Maps architect shows how geo-tagged Flickr images can be precisely incorporated into streetside views, demonstrates indoor panoramas at Pike Place Market complete with live video overlays, and even takes the audience into space with Microsoft's Worldwide Telescope. " This is a really exciting video and worth your 8 minutes.
At first glance before watching the video, my first thought is Microsoft breaking into a competition with Google over Google StreetView and that it might be up to a par level against it. I'm actually pretty impressed as well. Bing Maps looks like it deploys pretty similiar feature sets, but they've taken them slightly to the next level and put their own spin on things, but that isn't going to keep them on the wow factor list any longer than it takes to Google to deploy similar functionality, but better.
IMHO, for Bing Maps to stay in the lime-light and not get overrun by Google, they best get on doing the entire lower 48 states, so I can street view more than just Las Vegas or Los Angeles and troll through the streets and sights of some place like Guernsey, Wyoming.
I think at this point most of us have already read all the tech-oriented news by the time it hits Slashdot.
Used to be a time I could come here and actually discover something new. Now it's just regurgitated - somewhere you come to comment about news you've read elsewhere.
Never mind years ago, I challenge you to show me just ONE other app today that can, for example:
1) Take a random geo-tagged photo (flikr photos in the demo) and integrate it in 3-D into it's EXACT (not just geo-coordinate) correct spot in a 3-D scene
OR
2) Integrate live video into a 3-D scene following the camera pan in real-time
And, no, Google maps "pin the tail on the donkey" displaying of photos at geo-tagged locations is not even remotely the same thing. An idiot could do that. Microsoft is recognising the map scene in 3-D and (itself an extraorinarily difficult task) correlating that to 3-D adjusted photo content. This isn't an "incremental improvement" unless you consider the space shuttle an incremental improvement to a cart pulled by a donkey.
Nope - this is photosynth type technology being used here. It's not a matter of registering one photo with another, but rather of recognizing the 3-D content of each and 3-D translating (and zooming) one to overlay on the other.
Don't forget that the starting point isn't even two photos that are known to the of the same thing (taken from different angles at different distances). All you have is a geo-location of the photo you are trying to 3-D map into the scene. You don't know what the photo is of - someone standing at that spot could be pointing the camera in any direction and zooming into god knows what.
Whoever runs all the thousands of security cameras in major cities must be drooling uncontrollably.
Surely silverlight support on Linux isn't from Microsoft, nor proprietary either. It's GNU moonlight/mono - developed per Microsoft's public specifications.
I think when people talk of a technology being impressive, they are talking about, well, technology.
The fact that you don't want to use Silverlight or can't run it on Linux has nothing to do with how impressive the technology is.
Bitch all you want about Microsoft, but it was a very impressive demo. Kudos to the software guys who developed this stuff.
That's the problem with Microsoft, their demos are almost *always* impressive. They *always* show off things that make them look better than the competition, but with technology that rarely comes out as shown.
Remember when the iPhone came out, MS demoed their Surface? It was clearly meant to say, "iPhone, schmiphone, look how cool *our* product is!" Years later, I'm still waiting for all those cool Surfaces to start popping up. In the meantime, the iPhone has gone on to both redefine the smartphone market, has been improved twice, spawned a new product, and become a huge success.
Right now MS is on a major offensive against Google. This, as of right now, is just another smoke-and-mirrors fake-out meant to make people think Bing Maps is more amazing than it is. I'm not saying that Bing Maps isn't pretty cool, just that this is meant to make it look as though is significantly better than it is.
In this controlled demo, they had a guy with a camera and a wireless connection at the market. It was certainly very cool, but until this is something that *I* can actually use, it's just another promised amazing new technology that MS has yet to actually deliver on. And in this particular case, it seems like something that will be only available in a few places, as token, "see how cool this is", but not universal enough to be more than a novelty.
Say what you want about Google's perpetual Beta and Apple's secrecy, but at least I know that when Google announces something, I can start using it at some reasonable point in the future, and when Apple does, that the product shown is finished enough to be in stores once production and regulatory paperwork are covered.