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.
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.
Subscription readers can see the posts before they go live.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Wait, there are places other than /. to get news?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
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.
"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]
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!
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
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!".
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.
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."
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.
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.