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)
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Now if they can just get enough imagery into their database (i.e. every medium-large city world-wide), they might have a chance at actually becoming useful.
Not that Google's any better in that respect...
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Remember that Google also bought out the company that was developing Google Earth/Maps, they didn't itself actually innovate it. (since you listed keyhole, you probably knew that)
Theres many other Google services you would call "innovative", but are really bought startups that actually did the innovation.
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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.
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Also Microsoft Photosynth, the precursor to this street-view enhancement, was a pretty innovative idea straight out of Microsoft R&D, where quite a few good ideas come from.
There are many examples of things Microsoft got to first,
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It looks interesting, but I would hardly call it "kicking Google's ass". It's got some minor enhancements and some cute effects, but on the face of it, nothing that would make me want to switch from google maps. It doesn't actually seem to address any shortcomings of google maps, rather it focuses on making the whole thing look better and more interesting.
Currently, I use google maps only as a tool for finding quickly and easily where to go, and so far, it has been more than adequate. Perhaps if I were mor
One more point for Microsoft? (Score:5, Interesting)
"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]
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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.
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The current iteration of silverlight is not supported on PPC Mac OS X. Nor is it supported on any handheld phones. Especially not the iPhon
Not installing Silverilight! (Score:3, Insightful)
Get over it Microsoft!
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How about getting search right first? (Score:2)
About 2 months ago I took over a community wiki (moved it to a new domain) for a game with a traffic of thousands of users a month and several sites are linking to it now. Google and Yahoo managed to see this and list my site as second result directly below (the now defunct) original. Bing does not list the site at all!
So how about getting basic indexing right for the search engine before they come with this wizzy new feature stuff?
Not that I mind, I don't care about being indexed on Bing.
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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.
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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 obse
I actually prefer Bing Maps over Google Maps (Score:2)
If you had told me a year ago I would say that I would not have believed you.
We are looking for a new house. I have found that Bing is much more accurate that Google. This is especially true for new developments. The easy explanation for this is that Bing is using more up to date data. However, there have been times where google is off by 2-3 houses and Bing is right on the money.
I have also found that Bing's Bird Eye View is superior in my needs than street view is when trying to examine neighborhoods.
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I have found that Bing is much more accurate that Google.
Interesting. One big complaint about Google's mapping is that the street number data is usually a linear interpolation of the number range for the block. There are better data sources available for some areas. USC has an experimental geocoder [usc.edu] which uses parcel map data; when you put in an address, you get the centroid of the parcel from land ownership records. They have full coverage for Los Angeles, and are adding other areas.
(Incidentally,
Start building an AstroCartography Lab (Score:2)
on Voyager.
Seriously, it's this kind of work that proivdes the foundation for Stelar/Astro Cartography maps that we'll need if we're ever going to start expanding out of the Sol System.
Astroturfing Silverlight (Score:2, Troll)
So I follow the link to Bing world-wide telescope.
This page requires Silverlight 3.
No thanks.
1. I have enough trouble with two CPU-intensive web plugin environments.
2. If I wanted to take on the risk of Microsoft's security models, I'd be running Windows.
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]
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.
All MS bashing aside (Score:2)
It was pretty cool.
Max Headroom Movie (Score:2)
Nice to see the implementation of linking live video into virtual indoor maps. I remember seeing this done in Sci-Fi in the 1985 Max Headroom movie and thinking how cool it was.
Microsoft Photosynth (Score:2)
This is maps + Photosynth. If you aren't familiar with Photosynth, go watch it. THey took a bunch of random pictures from Flickr and built a 3D virtual tour of various famous monuments. Now they are taking intentional pictures and combining them. I predict that this is just the tip of a lot of really wowie things that will appear within the next decade. This + augmented realities can do a lot.
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I'm not knocking the technical achievement, what they did is definitely cool stuff. I just don't think it's game changi
Re:Innovation on Bing (Score:5, Funny)
Pft. Call me low-tech but I don't need no stinkin' phone to look at what's in front of me.
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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: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.
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.
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Huh?
You linked to a Google earth page that:
1) Let's the user drape a photo over the terrain layer (i.e. a pre-existing 3-D model)
2) Let's the user play "pin the tail on the donkey" with their photos
What do either of these have to do with 3-D model extraction from photos and mapping of photos into 3-D scenes?!!
What to either of these have even remotely to do with image recognition of any sort?!!
Clue: Those are rhetorical questions.
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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 astroturf
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Surely silverlight support on Linux isn't from Microsoft, nor proprietary either. It's GNU moonlight/mono - developed per Microsoft's public specifications.
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.
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Am I supposed to positively associate the casual reference to shills and astroturfers on /. with free thought? Because right now, considering the number of people who claim their existence without a shred of evidence, it's having the opposite effect.
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It's this willful dismissal of core features that keeps hurting their market share, too. When Google's transit system was on the fritz for 3 hours last week, I tried Bing assuming they would be able to provide an alternati
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I base this question on at least two reports of ovations at this weeks TED for mildly insightful talks and seeing ovations in almost every musical ever produced and moved to DVD for the rest of the world to see.
Yes, this is a serious question.
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Re:Innovation on Bing (Score:5, Funny)
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]
Re:Innovation on Bing (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe that it is the French who enthusiastically applaud interesting farts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_P%C3%A9tomane [wikipedia.org]
Re:How did you watch the 8 minute video? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How did you watch the 8 minute video? (Score:5, Funny)
Wait, there are places other than /. to get news?
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.
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Or, for those who don't need their tech news to be up-to-the-day.
Or week.
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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:Innovation on Bing (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Innovation on Bing (Score:4, Informative)
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This has been done several times before, but the problem is that people register accounts just to spam the results.
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"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."
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I blame the worthless copy blogs that google tends to favor so heavily. It was worth something when it wasn't a mess of complete garbage.
Usually it means I just have to work a bit harder at refining my results.
Maybe we have become spoiled as an internet culture. I remember digging through pages and pages to find something truly relevant.
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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), b
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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).
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I still prefer Google's home page for its sparseness, especially when I'm on the VPN and RDPed to a work computer. We're all (home, VPN, work computer) on fast pipes, but there's added latency that slows down the Bing image.
Would be nice if the first few bytes (or K) were measured, and depending on the perceived load time, they determined whether to show the image based on how
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One of the things that both of these search engines do is group some similar results into a category, but they arent using any automation to dynamically create categories. For example, both will group some videos together, and some images together:
Moon Landing [bing.com]
Moon Landing [google.com]
But they arent grouping forums together, published paper archives together, patent archives together, or any of the other classes of sites where you will get dozens of hits all with the exact same or very highly similar
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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.
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No, the US federal government did that decades before Microsoft even thought of copying it.
Nice try tho.
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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.
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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].
Being on par (and slightly winning) is really good with consoles, especially with a console that is only on its 2nd iteration. PS1 and PS2 basically dominated the market, killed Sega off from it and made Nintendo skip a generation.
I actually own all the consoles, they're slightly better on different things. First of all, lets get the Wii out of the way since it's targeted to general people and not gamers as such (not that it's not fun for gamers too, it is). PS3 is great with its OS and store. I find it muc
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That's ass backwards. The PS3 is the embarrassing little box that comes with the owner disclaimer of "Oh, well I bought it for a blu-ray player".
Worldwide Xbox 360 sales are just ahead of the PS3. In the US it more then doubles them, and is the defacto gaming console of the gamer type (note console, computers let out of this comparison). Your own link showed that, not sure ho
Ps3 is clearly better (Score:2)
Only kids who don't know any better buy an xbox ;)
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Don't know if it was the first, but their Terraserver (?) site was pretty interesting.
[John]
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Before Google Maps I remember there was Keyhole which was geared toward real estate and surveyors but also had a simple version for hobbyists. You had to pay a monthly subscription for the service to work but there was a basic trial version that worked for a week or so. Shortly after Google Earth came out and was free so I nearly forgot about Keyhole.
Its funny, I just looked up keyhole to check some facts and lo and behold Google bought them out and turned it into Google Earth. So it looks like Keyhole/Goog
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Yup.
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They give credit where credit is due. So no, its not the same thing.
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A perfect example of someone who hates Microsoft, just to hate Microsoft.
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But if you want to complain about Microsoft for something, start for the requirements to see that. Silverlight (and probably even IE run
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So is stupidity and blind devotion to an entity that wants to suck the very freedom out of soceity.
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So is stupidity and blind devotion to an entity that wants to suck the very freedom out of soceity.
Sarah Palin: You betcha!
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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.
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Why can't the american news world stop using the world technology for everything that isn't actual, real, new technology?
In other news: Blacksmith uses hammer and anvil technology to produce horseshoes. Film at eleven.
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Or, you could have listened to the fucking speaker where he flat out SAID they demoed that in 2007.
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After the revolution
Is it just me, or do you sound exactly like the various evangelists who babble about a Day of Reckoning? The difference is, your idea has had many repeated "revolutions", and has failed every time. Learn from Sisyphus - put down the rock, forget about the hill, and go get a fucking job.
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It could certainly open a whole new advertising avenue channel.
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.
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At first I thought it was almost impossible. But then I started to think about a few AI vision algorithms and realized that actually the technology to do this has been around for a long time. But I will say that the application is innovative (at least for me). I wouldn't have thought about doing it at all.
Re:So it's... Google Earth? (Score:4, Insightful)
Whoever runs all the thousands of security cameras in major cities must be drooling uncontrollably.
Using is Believing (Score:2)
I ask because it's not real, and it doesn't really work, until I'm able to do it reasonably well on my own PC. Think about it, wasn't there a demo video for Duke Nukem Forever? And what happened to that?
I'm not saying that what Microsoft is showing isn't cool; what I am saying is that they have a history of over-promising and under-delivering...and sometimes putting out buggy products.
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It's very cool, please don't think I'm just trolling, I just don't appreciate the total lack of attribution for the shoulders they're standing on.
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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.
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The app running in the phone most likely knows what direction the camera i pointing in (by reading the phones compass and inclinometer data). And you have an approximate location using the GPS. This reduces the search space drastically. Next, running a SIFT-like feature matching on the images and solving for a projective transform (meaning you can handle small deviations in photographer location without the image looking too strange), such that it works for a demo, doesn't seem overly complicated to me if y
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Really, will critics of MS ever recognize anything good that comes out of that company?
We'll get back to you when they release something good.
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I for one will...
I was really impressed, especially with the video embedding...that was incredible. I also liked that they blurred out faces in their images, but the didn't (couldn't?) in the video. I'm guessing that could be a privacy concern looming...
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Uh, what?
1) MS has released Silverlight specs to open source community to develop. This is what Moonlight project [wikipedia.org] is about. If the project doesn't have enough interest in developers, it is not MS's fault.
2) FOSS and Open Standards doesn't mean the original developers would be required to develop their software for all platforms and OS. It's about the standards and specs being out openly there, so others can develop them, and currently they are.
3) Silverlight with its open specs is actually even more open th
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Kill yourself.
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Yeah, I'm wondering how many geotagged Flickr photos there are that are licensed to allow Microsoft to re-use them commercially in this way. Surely not that many?