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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.
The movement in maps, different images and day/night time cycle with star maps when you're looking up looks great. In every aspect it seems Bing is really innovating and beating Google all the time. It's no surprise they're worried about Bing now.
Under capitalism all this technology is used to exploit us more, make us work harder for less or lose our jobs. Under socialism, a planned economy under the control of the workers, these technologies will enable a new flowering of human civilization. After the revolution people will look back on the epoch of capitalism like we look at the Dark Ages in Europe, as a barely comprehensible world of irrational misery and suffering. Forge a revolutionary Trotskyist international! Workers to power!
UNITE with the Campaign for a Free Internet because today, our future begins with tomorrow!
Will not be given to some Microsoft demo of them putting together other peoples tech and claiming it as their own.
Id rather watch paint dry.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
sopssa, this article was submitted on Sunday February 14, @06:06AM. You posted the first reply on Sunday February 14, @06:07AM.
How did you notice the Slashdot post, watch the 8 minute video, and post a reply here to Slashdot in approximately one minute?
Awesome, innovative. Good seeing Microsoft kicking Google's ass in something by doing it right. Huzzah for competition!
So Taco is a MS tool nowadays? This shit doesn't run on Linux.
From 2007 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3uY-1IbSqM at the end of the video they show images aggregated to form 3D images, so it looks like they've taken it further to produce maps, how nice.
Why can't the american news world stop using the world technology for everything that isn't actual, real, new technology? Probably the most hyped and buzzed non-buzzword in the world. F*'k. Stop using it already.
I don't want to be told how future products will revolutionize my life. How about you release the product and then I'll tell you what I think of it?
"3D is currently not supported for your browser. For a list of supported browsers, see Help."
Seeing help:
Supported browsers.
* Internet Explorer 6 or later
* Mozilla Firefox 3.0 or later
* Safari 3.1 or later
I'm using Firefox 3.6. But I guess it's not my browser that isn't supported. It's probably because I'm running it on Gentoo. I guess I will have to stick with Goggle Maps after all.
[sarcasm] One more point for Microsoft for web neutrality.[/sarcasm]
When you see it, you'll sh&t bricks....
Awesome...wait but it's Microsoft...so it's not awesome! It's crap!! :)
Really, will critics of MS ever recognize anything good that comes out of that company?
How long before advertisers start geo tagging pictures of them holding ads next to commonly viewed buildings and areas and putting them on flicker for bing maps to pick up?
I'm not a Microsoft hater or a Google lover, but... why is this "really exciting"?
All I saw in the video was yet another blatant attempt by Microsoft to steal users away from Google's innovative and wildly superior products. Bing maps looks like a direct cut and paste of Google Maps, except with a slightly snazzier segue animation, and an uterrly useless feature that perhaps one in ten-thousand people would actively use.
Yes, I fully admit that seeing a photo perfectly overlaid on a map is neat. However, the practical application for this is incredibly limited. I want my 8 minutes back, and I want Slashdot editors to stop approving hyperbolized story synopses that try to sell me on something.
About 2 months ago I took over a community wiki (moved it to a new domain) for a game with a traffic of thousands of users a month and several sites are linking to it now. Google and Yahoo managed to see this and list my site as second result directly below (the now defunct) original. Bing does not list the site at all!
So how about getting basic indexing right for the search engine before they come with this wizzy new feature stuff?
Not that I mind, I don't care about being indexed on Bing.
High risk behavior. Seemed to work out and impress though.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
So it's... Google Earth? With some extra bits bolted on?
I dunno. It's cool and all, but it was cooler when I first saw it years ago. This is neat as an evolutionary upgrade, but it's by no means anything new or revolutionary.
First, my firefox 3.5.7 isn't supported for their web client 3d option. Why, is it because I am running linux? Second, the "updated" maps or that worldwide telescope both need some ms proprietary crap called firelight. Sorry, but I won't install mono or moonlight or whatever is called the Icaza clone of ms tech just to find if it does fail to support some non-documented or too recent api needed for this ms site. Third, I set the language to English in the preferences. But since the idiotic bing maps site sees I am connecting from Italy, I get everything in Italian.Thanks, but no thanks. If I wanted to get the site in Italian, I'd have selected it. Ok, after some time I noticed there is a link at the bottom right that lets me see the maps in English, but that is it. Any language choice I make in the options is ignored. So, triple fail - most of the content is tied to windows, and what I get is not what I asked for, but what some programmer decided is best for me. In what is this exciting, or even new for microsoft?
TED's subtitle is 'Ideas Worth Spreading'. Al Gore's ideas, Jane Goodall's ideas, yes. But Microsoft's ideas?
I'm sure Microsoft get 'worth' by spreading them at a prestigious conference like TED. Masses and masses of 'worth'.
Is TED just a big marketing opportunity now?
google street view has been up and running for years now. it doesn't require some crappy plugin either.
How does one contrast the 'mining' of Flickr or Picassa photos to the sampling or music or plagiarism from books.
If you had told me a year ago I would say that I would not have believed you.
We are looking for a new house. I have found that Bing is much more accurate that Google. This is especially true for new developments. The easy explanation for this is that Bing is using more up to date data. However, there have been times where google is off by 2-3 houses and Bing is right on the money.
I have also found that Bing's Bird Eye View is superior in my needs than street view is when trying to examine neighborhoods.
On the other hand, I have disabled the silverlight view of Bing maps and gone back to the old view because of speed.
How long before someone manages to mashup a mapping site that pulls the content from bing maps and google maps/earth?
on Voyager.
Seriously, it's this kind of work that proivdes the foundation for Stelar/Astro Cartography maps that we'll need if we're ever going to start expanding out of the Sol System.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Its frm M$, so not even worth the time it takes to type this!
So I follow the link to Bing world-wide telescope.
This page requires Silverlight 3.
No thanks.
1. I have enough trouble with two CPU-intensive web plugin environments.
2. If I wanted to take on the risk of Microsoft's security models, I'd be running Windows.
Take 'em straight to TED.
Here's the URL for the video on the TED site, in a larger format, and without "techflash" anywhere nearby:
http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera.html
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
Have you actually used this new technology? Or are you just talking about the demo video?
I ask because it's not real, and it doesn't really work, until I'm able to do it reasonably well on my own PC. Think about it, wasn't there a demo video for Duke Nukem Forever? And what happened to that?
I'm not saying that what Microsoft is showing isn't cool; what I am saying is that they have a history of over-promising and under-delivering...and sometimes putting out buggy products.
Reposting logged in:
To people interested in image based rendering, something like the system presented by Microsoft is inevitable, yet still impressive when actually implemented. Look at the transitions in Google Streetview, for example: You have to pay close attention because it happens really fast, but you can see that Google also has a 3D proxy underneath the images. The transition is not between different projections of flat images but between rough approximations of the actual geometry, textured with the image data. That is what makes Microsoft's system so seamless as well. The existence of an underlying geometric understanding of the scene is also obvious when you move the cursor over a Streetview image or look at the cursor in the TED demo: It changes perspective depending on the geometry.
The critical algorithm at the core of it all is called "SIFT" (Scale Invariant Feature Transform). That's what enables the computer to identify matching features in different pictures, as long as they're taken from similar positions. (This is done after prefiltering the images according to geo-tagging information to reduce the search space.) Then you have sets of 2D coordinates of 3D points under several projections (images). This data defines a set of equations which you can solve to get the relative camera positions and 3D coordinates of the feature points. If you've followed the news on PhotoSynth, you might remember pictures of 3D point clouds: Those were the calculated 3D positions of feature points in the source images. From these point clouds, you can create an approximate representation of the geometry of the scene. If you then use the picture taken from a position closest to your current viewpoint to texture that geometric proxy, you get what Microsoft presented at TED. It really isn't all that complicated.
Inevitable, therefore not really surprising, but still mighty cool.
I call (minor) shenanigans on the live video overlay. Despite the twists and turns indicating a hand-held camera, there was absolutely no parallax in evidence, indicating either a mounted camera precisely set to rotate around its entrance pupil, or a static panoramic camera having its image cropped.
Get over it Microsoft!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
"Ideas worth spreading"... but not spreading very far... since they choose to use Silverlight. WTF?
I only have Silverlight installed on one of my 10 machines. And I honestly can't remember which one it is on. Can't say that I found any issues with it, but my interest in keeping my installed software stack low means I will keep it off most machines. It is rare to encounter a site that needs it, so it stays off.
So we have another possibly good idea from Microsoft technical that gets screwed by their marketing and management. Microsoft has become the new Xerox. See the history of Xerox PARC if you don't understand that comment.
Place nail here >+
Only kids who don't know any better buy an xbox ;)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I would give it 3 stars out of 5.
Not really as much of a "jump" as google streetview was at first look.
It was pretty cool.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Nice to see the implementation of linking live video into virtual indoor maps. I remember seeing this done in Sci-Fi in the 1985 Max Headroom movie and thinking how cool it was.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
in google you can use -inurl:somedomain.com
of course you'd need your own proxy to google to make this permanent; that is the approach used by www.givemebackmygoogle.com
This is maps + Photosynth. If you aren't familiar with Photosynth, go watch it. THey took a bunch of random pictures from Flickr and built a 3D virtual tour of various famous monuments. Now they are taking intentional pictures and combining them. I predict that this is just the tip of a lot of really wowie things that will appear within the next decade. This + augmented realities can do a lot.
Yes the video is really cool. Neat technology and all that.
But what about all the people in the photographs that are used to build these maps? There's an indelible record of where these people were and (roughly) what they were doing at a particular point in time. Is there value in this? Had any of those people "called in sick" and should be at work? Cheating on their spouses? Buying some fattening foods that aren't on their diets?
You can invent your own questions about these people, but I'm far more interested in them than those man-made structures this video is so enamored with.
This exact idea was first mentioned by me, circa 2007 right here on Slashdot in 2007.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Whoa, I got a little carried away with the "2007"s there. :^)
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
This ain't gonna help Bing maps, for one simple reason. Google has THEIR OWN full map of the US. I don't know if you've noticed, but since a few months ago, the copyright on the maps says (c) Google. They've actually invested a shitload of money and mapped everything (or close to everything) out.
This means they can actually _update_ the map, add and remove POIs, provide turn-by-turn directions (and compute them more effectively), and do all the other nice things that anal retentive contracts with map data providers did not let them do previously.
Guess what, Microsoft doesn't have that data, and as far as I'm aware, there's no effort underway to collect it. This is epic fail which no amount of Silverlight eye candy will be able to fix.
It was much easier to come here and actually discover something before bloggers came along.
As already pointed out, microsoft stuff tends to be very cool and "innovative" when demoed, but usually fails to deliver at later date (witch is almost always far later, than initially announced)
The proceedings usually go like - when demoed, LOOK HERE IS SOMETHING REALLY COOL AND SAFE AND STABLE with all the excellent features that we PLAN to implement.
But somewhere down the process the "cool" stuff will usually be stripped out and the rest is either implemented poorly or disastrously.
I don believe this before it's happened. then im willing to discuss the serious aspects of this. Before that, this is just a cool demo, destined for another MS treatment at later date.
Or do you need to lug around a supercomputer in a rucksack?
Deleted
The impressing part is where SIFT is utilized in realtime for each videoframe. This means 25 times per second, within a few frames lag the 2D image is superpositioned over the 3D representation. I wonder if they direct the SIFT calculation to a server doing all the math, or the Silverlight client manages to do this itself. I'd put my money on the first, with the client consuming a videofeed relayed from a server along with calculated 3D spatial information.
You don't understand the legal definition of a Covenant
It's weird. When I've tried Bing for regular search, its been better than Google. Mainly, I think that is because people selling things have really honed in on optimizing their sites for Google, so when I search for some technical information, half the results are useless companies trying to sell me something slightly related. They haven't concentrated on doing that to Bing yet, so right now its more useful.
Bing maps has a much nicer interface than Google. Same for their video search.
Yet most of my searching remains with Google. As near as I can tell, I'm simply too lazy to change. Google has become such a habit it doesn't matter that Bing might actually be better.
"My name is Jon Abbott, and Bing maps was my idea"?
I just saw a video on Channel 9 showing that the Hard Rock Cafe is using Microsoft Surface and other touchscreen devices in a few of their restaurants. Considering the device was only release about 2 years ago and has such a large price tag I am still impressed with what they have done. Check it out:
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/LarryLarsen/The-Tech-Behind-The-Hard-Rock-Cafe/Default.aspx
Wikipedia mentions AT&T, Harrah’s, Disneyland, Sheraton Hotels and MSNBC as users of the Microsoft Surface too. I have yet to see one, but it still is making it's way into the market.
I trust MS is using Flickr photos strictly according to their licensing settings and not just wholesale pillaging other people's copyright for their own commercial gain...
Read Pynchon.
I just saw a video on Channel 9 showing that the Hard Rock Cafe is using Microsoft Surface and other touchscreen devices in a few of their restaurants.
Oh, I'm well aware that they exist, but they are still little more than novelties, which is exactly the point I'm getting at.
While MS is announcing products that aren't ready, in controlled demos that are very impressive, Apple and Google ship actual products that people actually use.
Considering the device was only release about 2 years ago and has such a large price tag I am still impressed with what they have done.
It's hardly impressive that there are a handful of places using Surface. Even if Surface totally sucked (which it doesn't, it only half-sucks. It's a cool technology, but with extremely limited practical use), MS would be able to get a few high profile installations.
But more specifically to my point, Surface was announced to counter the iPhone. It was a controlled tech demo, which was really impressive, but years later we just have a few novelty installations.
Now, look at the Bing Maps demo. While some of the features are a bit better than Google Maps, it's the camera overlay that is the headliner here, and it looks like it'll be just like Surface. There will probably be a few cameras here and there, so while very cool, it won't be very useful.
Think about what it would take to make this more universal (like street view). MS would have to get cameras placed all over. Even just limiting it to a few cities (Seattle, NY, SF), for example, would be an enormous undertaking to provide any sort of coverage beyond a half-dozen or so landmarks. Look, it's the Pike Place Market, and now, it's Times Square. Cool on its own, but ultimately little more than a gimmick, a tech demo.
Check it out:
I'd love to. Surface seems like it would be pretty cool to play with for about 10 minutes. Call me when I can encounter one in my day-to-day life and not have to watch an MS video or take a vacation to see one. Until then, it's just a gimmick, no matter how amazingly cool it is to operate.
Where In The World Is Ned Ryerson?
BING!
So? All Microsoft has to do is to take out its checkbook and create a partnership with a company like Teleatlas.
What would be really tough is getting the degree of street view coverage Google has.
On top of that, there is scaling this kind of technology so that it works with the volume of data and users that Google has. In many ways, Google is a data storage and distribution company. They've got something like synergy, only it's much more concrete: an infrastructure that is useful for a wide variety of applications serving data to lots and lots of people. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft can grow their apps to the scale of use Google has, and whether they can do it on the software they sell to others.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Oh noes. I can apply your "logic" too. I stay in a 3rd world country. No surfaces or even iphones here. Ergo, they are gimmicks and useless. I don't want to see a video or take a vacation to see one. Waaaaaah Waaaaah.
Its amazing how anti-ms trolls think. Though, not surprising considering Slashdot is the meeting point for ms haters around the world.
I am stuck with my G4 Powerbook 15" which I bought new in 2003. It's got a 1.4gz processor and a gig of ram. Runs Leopard and performance-wise is just as powerful as any netbook out there. I still see a bunch of these laptops being used around town.
Says it's not supported in my browser. Figures.
Teleatlas is owned by TomTom. TomTom won't allow turn-by-turn navigation with its maps, since it makes their core business redundant. I guess MSFT could just buy both, but that's unlikely to happen.