Bing Maps Wows 'Em At TED2010 277
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.
Anything on TED is worth your time (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How did you watch the 8 minute video? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:8 Minutes of my life (Score:3, Informative)
No, the US federal government did that decades before Microsoft even thought of copying it.
Nice try tho.
Re:Innovation on Bing (Score:3, Informative)
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]
Re:8 Minutes of my life (Score:3, Informative)
Don't know if it was the first, but their Terraserver (?) site was pretty interesting.
[John]
Re:Innovation on Bing (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Innovation on Bing (Score:5, Informative)
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!".
Re:Innovation on Bing (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How about getting search right first? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:One more point for Microsoft? (Score:2, Informative)
Also - a lot of Bing Maps is beta or just freshly out of Beta. I'm using their API on web sites where I am asked to integrate a map as it just really works better IMHO.
Re:Innovation on Bing (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Innovation on Bing (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:How about getting search right first? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Link-whore and Silverlight-free version (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the URL for the video [ted.com] on the TED site, in a larger format, and without "techflash" anywhere nearby:
http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera.html [ted.com]
Re:Innovation on Bing (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Innovation on Bing (Score:1, Informative)
"million dollar ideas -site:slashdot.org"
How it's done (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Innovation on Bing (Score:3, Informative)
"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."
Covenant (Score:1, Informative)
You don't understand the legal definition of a Covenant
Re:One more point for Microsoft? (Score:1, Informative)
The 3d stuff requires Silverlight, but Bing Maps is still quite usable via the AJAX interface (sans 3d features), which works fine on Linux and non-Silverlight supported browsers.