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.
Re:Innovation on Bing (Score:1, Insightful)
And yet Google is still better for, well... you know, searching for things. For some reason, I think that might be better than lots of fancy R&D projects. Maybe it's because they're both... "search engines".
Re:8 Minutes of my life (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:8 Minutes of my life (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How did you watch the 8 minute video? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:"Technology" (Score:2, Insightful)
Uh, where does it say something being "technology" has to be something really really new like when electricity was invented? Have you played too much Civilization? :)
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/technology [wiktionary.org]
(uncountable) the study of or a collection of techniques.
(countable) a particular technological concept
the body of tools and other implements produced by a given society.
I think it fits quite good, and it's not like what they're doing even exists currently.
Re:Thought I saw this before... (Score:3, Insightful)
Or, you could have listened to the fucking speaker where he flat out SAID they demoed that in 2007.
Re:8 Minutes of my life (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org]?
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 [xkcd.com].
Re:sage (Score:1, Insightful)
I like Linux and all (especially as a server OS), but the fact that this will not run on Linux is a failing of Linux as a desktop OS. It's simply not a very good desktop OS and is not capable of running the latest and greatest in desktop OS software, games, web plugins, etc. Deal with it.
So, MS is up to its usual crap of making sure nothing they create will run on anything other than Windows and this is a failure by their competitors? What complete and utter horseshit.
According to your logic because the computer chip in a GM car doesn't run the software Ford uses in their cars/chips it's a failure on GM's part.
Are you really that stupid?
Re:Anything on TED is worth your time (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So it's... Google Earth? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:So it's... Google Earth? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:So it's... Google Earth? (Score:4, Insightful)
Whoever runs all the thousands of security cameras in major cities must be drooling uncontrollably.
Re:Innovation on Bing (Score:3, Insightful)
Surely silverlight support on Linux isn't from Microsoft, nor proprietary either. It's GNU moonlight/mono - developed per Microsoft's public specifications.
Re:Anything on TED is worth your time (Score:3, Insightful)
Photosynth is clearly brilliant, and MS has stitched a number of good components together into a well polished product. Integration with video (I believe google added webcam support though) and the star maps is elegant, as is the use of flikr's wealth of images. Their bingmap aps thing looks like it could have room for interesting uses, IF the sdk is good, simple and freely available.
Re:One more point for Microsoft? (Score:3, Insightful)
The current iteration of silverlight is not supported on PPC Mac OS X. Nor is it supported on any handheld phones. Especially not the iPhone. Google maps has native integration on the iPhone and works on PPC Mac OS X and linux.
Sure, it might be simpler to code Bing maps on your projects. But look out for when the client calls asking why it doesn't show up on her iPhone.
Seth
Re:Innovation on Bing (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Not installing Silverilight! (Score:3, Insightful)
Get over it Microsoft!
Re:Innovation on Bing (Score:3, Insightful)
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) [cyclestreets.net] 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).
Re:How did you watch the 8 minute video? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Innovation on Bing (Score:5, Insightful)
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.