You Won’t Be Lost if You Have a Camera Phone and Access to Virtual Earth
Looks like Microsoft is working hard on some interesting features for Virtual Earth.
The map-search technology required Microsoft to get millions of street-level pictures of Seattle’s buildings and landmarks. Those pictures were added to a database and indexed by distinguishing features that can be cross referenced to pictures sent in by users.
Increasingly sophisticated mobile phones are becoming a popular device to search for maps, directions and other local information and Microsoft said the service is a logical next step.
“When you are using a mobile phone, then inputting text can sometimes be difficult. So we decided to make the camera the input,” said Xing Xie, a Microsoft researcher who was demonstrating the technology.
Fascinating how all these acquisitions Microsoft has made over the past few years are beginning to work together to make what could be a very useful application. Being a Geographer I’m never lost, but my wife can’t find her way out of a closet. I could see this being great value to her (as opposed to call him and trying to describe where she is over a cell phone).
It looks like this technology is very hard to get working so it might be a long time before it gets out of the Microsoft research labs and into the public.
I guess this is for when the GPS signal doesn’t work to give your location? It seems slightly ridiculous.
Well I don’t own a GPS so…. Joe Average probably isn’t carrying around a GPS in their pocket either.
@Matt – Or when you don’t have a GPS! Most regular people don’t carry a GPS receiver with them, but an increasing number of people have a Phone with a Camera built in on them all the time. Keep in mind that this was being shown as part of Microsoft’s Research Fair (Techfest) and isn’t in a shipping product. More on Techfest here: http://research.microsoft.com/aboutmsr/techfest
didn’t amazon do something like this awhile ago? maps plus images of both sides of the street?
Amazon did have “Street Level Photos”, but since A9 Maps has been shut down I’m not sure what happened to them.
http://maps.a9.com/
Live maps has a preview of streetside imagery (similar to the A9 streetside maps interface) here:
http://preview.local.live.com/
but i should point out that this preview and the Amazon A9 streetside application are very different from the research project that started this thread. In that case you aren’t viewing images of buildings – you take a picture with your camera phone and ask a web service to tell you where you are based on image recognition that compares your image to a database of known images.
All new cell phones (at least in the US) have GPS built into them. If you have a cell phone new enough to have a camera, I would imagine it would have the integrated GPS.
While all cell phones in the US do have E911, that doesn’t translate a GPS unit. Many phones that support E911 do it though radio triangulation.
two other important points to note. First, just because your phone has a GPS chip in it DOESN’T mean you have access to it! many Mobile operators don’t expose access to the GPS to third parties.
and adding onto James’s point about many phones using some form of triangulation that doesn’t involve gps to do e911. this is quite true and in almost all cases this location info is also not readily available to third party devs.
I can certainly see uses for that kind of image indexing.
But to figure out where you are, it is much easier to to some trigonometry on the GSM radio signals. Or even build a GPS into the phone.
Quite amazing how negative people seem to be regarding this technology. Coming up with a different form factor and a UI using the camera totally makes sense and is quite clever. Given that there’s hundreds of millions of camera-enabled cell phones in use around the Globe this only makes sense. The fact that this is a research project (ie. likely in Alpha) its also kind of early to be bashing the technology.. I can’t wait to see more of where this is going. Given the current cumbersome nature of most mobile mapping apps out there right now, anything that is faster, doesn’t crash my phone, and reduces keytrokes will be a welcomed application.
@Jan Egil Kristiansen
While that might be true this methond works on all cell phones and would be easy enough for all people to use. I can’t imagine Verizon giving access to any “outside” firm to perform this kind of location and they’d probably charge an arm and a leg for it.
It could be a very useful tool to add geotags to Flickr images.
And both useful and scary, if MSN or Google applied this technology to their image indexing.
The above discussion is really interesting. But I should point out that this technology has bigger business values, since it can return an exact business name, instead of a rough location (maybe within 100-200m range). In this case, it can actually work together with a GPS.
Well GPS often doesn’t work in buildings, or more crucially between buildings. The image recognition side of things is probably harder than you might think. I suppose something that knew your last position could have a guess at the radius from that based on time etc, or use the mobile radio triangulation to narrow the search thus making this a solveable problem.
Will inertial navigation ever be cheap enough to thow into the Kalman filter, in addition to GSM-trig, GPS and images? Bluetooth cooperation with other devices that might have a better fix?
Returning to the ‘easy’ solutions: OCR on a street sign must be easier than general image recognition? (Or did I get lost because there are no signs? I’ve never been to Seattle.) What about navigational bar codes on the house numbers – the phones should soon have a bar code reader anyway? (Just add a laser pointer to the camera.)
Wouldn’t shops want a bluetooth device to beam the URL of its WAP page? And that page should surely contain its position?
While I am negative to the navigational usefulness of image recognition (OK – it works in cruise missiles, but they have done their homework – you didn’t, that’s why you got lost), dreaming up this applications is big fun.