From the Microsoft Labs…
So this looks interesting (the video dates from July so I’m wondering how I missed this before), but the practicality of it seems far-fetched. I guess I could look at them on my laptop/iPhone before driving the route, but looking down at a video while I’m driving seems dangerous. Plus how often would they update these? Would they have nighttime versions to help navigate when the sun is down (to me a city I’m not familiar with looks totally different at night)?
Oh and is this a preview of Microsoft’s Street View?
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Ah I can see it now!
Millions of people driving down the road with their heads glued to a display telling them where to go. Then they can get out of their cars and their iPhones will tell them how to get to the store.
It will be great! We won’t have to learn anything anymore! We won’t have to talk to people. We won’t have to read.
What a futuristic society we’re becoming!
I’m Guy Montag and I approve of this future.
Of course, we don’t need to read stuff anyway!
Seriously, I could see this ported to a heads up display in some modified form. The HUD technology is pretty mature at this point and some cars already have basic information like speed and rpm’s projected up to the windshield in front of the driver. Some race teams have even experimented with the technology for their drivers. It’s only a matter of time…
Oops looks like I mirrored Kirk’s comments so it must be true!
After they GoogleStreetMSMapVideoView ™every street in the nation I’ll save a TON on gas foregoing future vacations. C’mon kids, let’s drive Route 66!
“looking down at a video while I’m driving seems dangerous” If the orientation and location of the car is known, it should be possible to augment reality with a head-up display (HUD) similar to that used in aircraft.
In addition to driving directions, wireframes from Google’s 3D Warehouse could be streamed to an android phone, which would then output the vectors to the HUD, along with advertisements.
I use Google StreetView all the time when I’m going to be driving someplace unfamiliar. I used it to familiarize myself with what the intersection I will have to turn at actually look like. It’s incredibly useful when confronted with directions that make absolutely no sense, and you can pretty easily get the feel for key intersections so that you don’t have to read any directions or look at a map while you are driving. I can see using this video the same way. I think it’s quite useful without having to use it in the car.
Read this quote from Tech Review (http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23711/?a=f):
“What we wanted to do is build a system where we could give [drivers] those visual cues before they got into the car,” says Billy Chen, a researcher in the MSN Advanced Engineering group. Ideally, he says, the driver would feel as if she’s driven the route before, even if she’s never been on those streets.
Look I get that you could do this on your desktop, but if MSFT is worried about those folks, then they’ve already lost against Google and Apple in the mobile/routing space.
Point taken, but they’ve already lost in the search space too, and that didn’t stop them from launching Bing. The internet changes too fast to stop trying just because Google has you beat right now. On the other hand, it’s Microsoft so the likelihood of success is minimal.
I had a very interesting conversation with a very mobile person the other day. He travels constantly, and uses his pocket communicator to guide him around.
One morning he drove his rental away from his hotel, and set out for the airport. The device he used the previous day to drive from airport to client site to lunch to client site and then to his hotel was broken. So he looked for a map; none in the car. And because he slavishly followed the previous day’s turn-by-turn directions without thinking, he realized he had no idea where he was relative to the airport…no idea whether he was at 9 o’clock or 3 o’clock on the highway around the town, which way it was to the airport, and no idea which way he needed to drive if he did find the highway. He was completely lost…and he’d lost his ‘mental map’ that would have given him a rough reference.
Don’t let this happen to you people. It may happen you’ll never find it again.
Don’t have a satnav, I read a map, write the key intersections on a post-it note if necessary, and use my basic navigational senses honed by 3 billion years of evolution to find my way. So far I generally seem to end up in the right place, and having paid attention to the actual route, I can usually find my way home again afterwards…
As for the perils of yet more tech toys on the dashboard…
This reminds me of the old Rand McNally Photo-Auto Guide maps, with turn-by-turn photos of each major landmark so drivers don’t get lost. Those maps stop being produced until Google decided to do a street view version. Is the natural evolution video then?
The Rand McNally Photo-Auto Guides are at: http://openlibrary.org/b/OL7011569M/Rand_McNally_photo-auto_guide_...
At PDC 2009 I asked one of the Microsoft Bing Maps guys when they’ll be coming out with their version of street views and he just smiled and said “you know I can’t answer that but wouldn’t it be cool if and when we did.” haha
He did say that the Bing Maps AJAX API’s next version will be released in a month or so.