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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.
Pot, kettle, black ;).
Will not be given to some Microsoft demo of them putting together other peoples tech and claiming it as their own.
Wasn't MS one of the first with a "google earth" like service, just lacking colors.
Awesome, innovative. Good seeing Microsoft kicking Google's ass in something by doing it right. Huzzah for competition!
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 guess you really hate Google Earth in that case.
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When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
And yet you read Slashdot, which is an amalgamation of other peoples tech and is claimed to be the work of CmdrTaco/Geeknet, Inc.
Wait, there are places other than /. to get news?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
No, the US federal government did that decades before Microsoft even thought of copying it.
Nice try tho.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
While we're on the topic of rude things I must ask: Do Americans give standing ovations to particularity loud or interesting farts or is there some minimum standard of quality I can't ascertain?
I base this question on at least two reports of ovations at this weeks TED for mildly insightful talks and seeing ovations in almost every musical ever produced and moved to DVD for the rest of the world to see.
Yes, this is a serious question.
I ate your fish.
"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]
Maybe I'm going to the wrong Google, but for the past few months, the things I've been looking for have been on the second or third page, if they're present at all. Clusty is better at prioritising the results, but their database is so small that there's a bigger chance that the one you want won't be there at all. The biggest problem with Google at the moment is that it will return a hundred copies of the same mailing list post in different list archiving site, and hide the result that's actually useful somewhere in the middle of them. Not sure if Bing is any better, but there's definitely some significant room for improvement in the search engine space.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Or, you could have listened to the fucking speaker where he flat out SAID they demoed that in 2007.
From my understanding, Microsoft has actually been the first with a lot of technologies (admittedly, most of them were pretty obvious, like Mp3 Players and Tablet PCs) but they lacked the design capability to actually make anything that a consumer would want until they can copy it from someone else. Too much infighting and politics. I mean, look at the XBox. They pour untold millions into that thing, and it is, at best, on par in only the US and UK markets?
Actually, I find a lot of those numbers surprising. I know several people with Wiis and PS3s, but no one with an XBox. Well, not anyone who would admit to it, I suppose. But, it is important to interpret data honestly.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Plus you have the crowd effect. I've been to plays and concerts where I didn't think it deserved a standing ovation and based on other folks sitting, they didn't either. But a bunch of people stand, then the folks around them stand, and it continues until everyone is on their feet. But it doesn't cost me 20% of the ticket price and it's a good chance to start out for the car :)
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Agree. And generally they're all the same question with no answer. The other problem are the mistyped domain folks and search engine scammers. You can tell since your search term is part of a long string of alphabetized search terms.
Bing just doesn't have the scumbags infesting the database yet.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
I'll shandt bricks?
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
I mean, look at the XBox. They pour untold millions into that thing, and it is, at best, on par in only the US and UK markets?
Actually, I find a lot of those numbers surprising. I know several people with Wiis and PS3s, but no one with an XBox. Well, not anyone who would admit to it, I suppose. But, it is important to interpret data honestly.
Being on par (and slightly winning) is really good with consoles, especially with a console that is only on its 2nd iteration. PS1 and PS2 basically dominated the market, killed Sega off from it and made Nintendo skip a generation.
I actually own all the consoles, they're slightly better on different things. First of all, lets get the Wii out of the way since it's targeted to general people and not gamers as such (not that it's not fun for gamers too, it is). PS3 is great with its OS and store. I find it much nicer to use, especially as a media player device, than 360. However, 360's Live as a social gaming, friends and such beats PS3's system. PS3 also is technically better, but it came at really high cost at first and now they had to drop things to get PS3 Slim to lower price.
But the fact is, consoles are something only a few companies can dominate and they all do put millions into it. The current generation of consoles is actually interesting since there are no actual losers - PS3 and 360 are competing about players, are pretty much par with each other, while Wii takes players and general audience.
The next generation will be much more bloody.
Don't know if it was the first, but their Terraserver (?) site was pretty interesting.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Pft. Call me low-tech but I don't need no stinkin' phone to look at what's in front of me.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
So I go to look at this impressive new technology. Guess what?
It's MS Silverlight only/required.
And *that* makes it singularly unimpressive, to me. Sure, there is some kind of support for Silverlight on Linux. But I have enough experience of the company and their practices that I don't want to use their proprietary software on my system. So:
Fail.
Bring it to everyone, without the requirements to become a MicroSerf of some sort, and then I'll be impressed right up there along with the shills and astroturfers.
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
You're talking about the 360 right? Are you saying you don't know anyone that would admit to owning a 360? And you're in the US?
That's ass backwards. The PS3 is the embarrassing little box that comes with the owner disclaimer of "Oh, well I bought it for a blu-ray player".
Worldwide Xbox 360 sales are just ahead of the PS3. In the US it more then doubles them, and is the defacto gaming console of the gamer type (note console, computers let out of this comparison). Your own link showed that, not sure how/why you ended up writing what you did when your own evidence clearly contradicts your statement.
Furthermore, for video game sales the 360 the biggest sellers of all the consoles (meaning a lot of people that own Wii's don't really buy games for it, and there are few blockbusters for the Wii, but in its defense when a blockbuster comes along it sells very very well).
I believe that it is the French who enthusiastically applaud interesting farts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_P%C3%A9tomane
Huh? Did you watch the whole presentation? The flickr images displayed in 3-D in-place in the street view? The LIVE video being overlayed in-place in the street view, following the camera pan in real-time? For that matter what about the smooth zooming in/out of the map itself vs Google Map's stop-and redraw at next level.
Bitch all you want about Microsoft, but it was a very impressive demo. Kudos to the software guys who developed this stuff.
As someone who's being developing software professionally for 30 years I tend to by cynical and blase, but stuff like this really is impressive and makes you stop and say "Wow!".
Street View debuted with part of SF and Silicon Valley. Google's had a long, long time to get those images - Bing still has to build its fleet of camera cars (and hopefully they'll be higher-resolution than the ones Google sent out). I have noticed that Bing tends to have somewhat newer aerial imagery, and Bird's Eye is fantastic for getting an idea of what a place actually looks like - I've used that since the Live days.
Did you register as the site admin? -- Most search engines require registering and authorizing to yield better search indexing. All the major indexes use this: google webmaster, yahoo, and bing. Sure, you can wait for a crawler to pick it up -- but it can take a while for it to find a new domain. You are better off going through the proper channels.
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.
I remember digging through pages and pages to find something truly relevant
So do I. Not having to do that was one of the reasons I started using Google (the other was the modem-friendly front page, which is less important now that there are browser search bars and I don't use a modem). There's not so much of a reason to stay with Google when it doesn't do a better job than its competitors.
Back on topic, I wish OpenStreetMap would get more attention. It doesn't have the nice satellite images (it would be nice if a government would donate some satellite time to the project), but it does have a lot more information on the maps than most of the commercial equivalents. Google Maps, for example, doesn't tell me where all of the pubs in my area are. The database is open, so it would be quite easy to add things like geotagged images. The information on Flickr seems to be easily available, so you could just have a bot crawl the site and add the URLs of every tagged image at the correct coordinates in the OSM database.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
Really, will critics of MS ever recognize anything good that comes out of that company?
We'll get back to you when they release something good.
If you can read this, it means that I bothered to log in.
Surely silverlight support on Linux isn't from Microsoft, nor proprietary either. It's GNU moonlight/mono - developed per Microsoft's public specifications.
Here's my million dollar idea. Why can't I have a search engine where I can click on a search result 'never show results from this domain again'. It might take awhile but you could build up nice filtered list after awhile. Hell, even being able to share your list with people and the community builds a good filtered list to get rid of the crap.
Yes, I did.
...
You mean like this?
Then no, you didn't. You said you did, but obviously you didn't. The only slightly similar thing is that in google earth when a user clicks on a link, it will zoom into a position where the image perfectly aligns (if the person who authored the link successfully made it align.) Thats in contrast to what Microsoft is doing where no matter what orientation the user has put himself, the image will be morphed to align, and that no link authoring is necessary at all (nor any tedious positioning, by definition)
You mean that irrelevant eye candy effect that google earth had since it was first released?
Google Earth does not do this with the overlayed images. To get the overlayed images, you must click on a link to them and then the camera is moved to a specific position for viewing. Essentially, this google earth feature is stupidly not useful at all and has simply been hacked into their earth client with the absolute bare minimum of effort.
It makes me wonder if you are aware of the tools which have been available for, say, the past 5 years.
I do not wonder weather or not you viewed the demonstration video. I know you didn't. You couldn't have without being so retarded about whats in it.
"His name was James Damore."
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.
No, I didn't.
I do the site for fun (i.e. no material interest, no ads, etc.), and most users already found the site through the previous wiki and the forums. Being indexed is just a minor convenience at best in this case, which is why I don't care about it much.
Just strolling through the statistics now and then, and see what comes around. Google and Yahoo come around, find the site and update their index according to relevance (content, user count, link count, what have you not).
The Googlebot is fun to observe, as it is kind of smart. Instead of querying the whole site over and over again, it just checks the recent changed page to get the deltas (i.e. understands MediaWiki).
Registering sites with search engines is very 90'-ish, so if you don't get indexed automatically by a search engine while having a considerable traffic (I consider several thousand visitors a month from various countries considerable), than it is a broken search engine - if you can even call it a search engine, maybe toy would be a better description.
Note: I did not register with Google or Yahoo either and don't and didn't use their analytic tools, so they came by them selves crawling the web.
I also heard a lot of horror stories about the MSN/Bing bot going awry and causing DoS like behaviour, so I'm actually happy that it stays away.
Just wanted to point out some simple observations here.
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 tried signing in to Google? It has Promote and Remove buttons for each search result, if you're logged in.
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 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.
Get over it Microsoft!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
You mean like Google's Experimental Search ?
"Don't like it? This button (fig. 1b) will remove the result, and it will remain hidden when you search for the same keyword(s) in the future."
Google Maps, for example, doesn't tell me where all of the pubs in my area are.
OpenStreetMap was started by a British guy, so it's not really a surprise ;-).
CycleStreets (example route) uses OSM data and has extra from-the-bike images, but I'm not sure where they come from. It's also an example of the extra OSM information: on OSM, the roads are tagged by what's allowed to use them, which means it can suggest e.g. walking a bike over a pedestrian bridge if it saves a 5-minute detour (or avoids busy roads, if you ask for that).
I have found that Bing is much more accurate that Google.
Interesting. One big complaint about Google's mapping is that the street number data is usually a linear interpolation of the number range for the block. There are better data sources available for some areas. USC has an experimental geocoder which uses parcel map data; when you put in an address, you get the centroid of the parcel from land ownership records. They have full coverage for Los Angeles, and are adding other areas.
(Incidentally, how is geocoding for Japan coming along? Japan tends to assign house numbers as serial numbers, not by position, so interpolation won't work. Somebody must have collected that data for at least Tokyo and Osaka by now.)
You do realize that, even in the olden days, in order for someone to submit a link, they generally needed to have read it somewhere else first? Slashdot stories did not arise by abiogenesis.
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.