Google Maps and Google Earth just got their second update of 2012 to add 45º imagery, which now covers 17 U.S. and seven international cities. These 45º views cause buildings to cast shadows and rotate with real perspective. It's an almost-3D view that makes the satellite view of a place more realistic while still supporting most systems.
45º views act as a transition between the standard top-down view and Google's new Google MapsGL, a full-3D Maps experience powered by WebGL in the browser. That part won't work on certain low-end graphics cards, but for those who can run it, Google Maps gets pretty magical. Google has good reason to push the envelope on 3D maps. Its competitors are working on magical maps of their own.
Would you look at the world through Google Glasses? If you did, what would you see? That may be an option soon, if a reliable report today that the company is in "late prototype stages" on just such a product, proves accurate.
The Wow factor is clear - but what would fashionable cloud (connected) glasses really mean? How might they change what it means to be human and to live in this world? Make no mistake, they certainly could have a deep impact for those who wear them - and possibly for those who are seen through them as well. There's no better time than now to begin considering it all. The best way to start is to recognize those who have already begun before us; in this case science fiction author Vernor Vinge is a key source of illumination.
Amazon just announced the release of Flow an augmented reality shopping app for the iPhone. It uses both barcode and image recognition in a live camera view to help users shop. It recognizes books, DVDs, CDs, video games and all kinds of other packaged items "like a box of cereal," whether by scanning the image or the barcode.
Flow can show shoppers Amazon's reviews and ratings as they're holding a product in their hands. It also has Facebook and Twitter sharing options. Of course, users can also opt to buy the product from Amazon, even though they're holding it in their hands. The free app is available on the iTunes Store.
The most prominent national environmentally-aligned political party in the world, the German Green Party, saw its Berlin chapter announce a groundbreaking mobile app today that allows supporters to discuss environmental issues around the city and brings party billboards to life using Augmented Reality. I think it's pretty cool.
The mobile app allows users to create, view as overlays on their mobile camera viewer and discuss Points of Interest regarding environmental problems and solutions around the city. The app can also be pointed at Green Party billboards, which will trigger the launch of a mobile video message from party candidates discussing the issues depicted on the billboards, but in greater depth. Check out the videos below, I think this is one of the coolest uses of Augmented Reality I've seen yet.
"Mobile video is shaky by definition," says Norman Winarsky, VP at SRI Ventures, part of Silcon Valley-based SRI International, a nonprofit performing sponsored R&D for governments, foundations and businesses. "A shaky image affects bandwidth and reduces the experience," he explains.
But with the technology Google has licensed from SRI, image stabilization will no longer be a concern ... at least on Android. Google is implementing the SRI tech in its Google Talk application, to deliver better video on Android 3.0+ devices. And that may be only the beginning of Google's computer vision plans.
If you use Foursquare and Facebook Places to notify your followers where you are, you might be interested in a new iOS app called Checkin+, from Shape Services, the same folks that created IM+, a multiple IM client app. If you are tired of tapping when checking in, this is the app for you.
How many times have you found yourself in possession of a whole lot of digital content that should be tied to a very specific physical place, maybe even a particular spot in a room, but with no easy way to tie together the two dimensions of online ephemera and real-world location? Maybe that doesn't happen to you very much yet, but if you worked at a museum - it would happen all the time. And wouldn't you like to imagine yourself working at a museum? I suspect you would.
The good people at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon found themselves in just such a situation and have leveraged an interesting new mobile publishing platform in order to capture some of the value of place-based digital content in order to share it with their patrons.
Are you ready for some augmented reality (AR) apps that aren't gimmicky and pointless? So is Qualcomm. The chipset maker released its AR software development kit (SDK) for Android last fall and is preparing to launch an iOS version next month, in addition to supporting Unity's game engine for cross-platform development.
But Jay Wright, Senior Director of Business Development for Qualcomm, says criticism that AR has, so far, produced no "real world apps" are valid. He also told us he's working with two big-name retailers to put out some of the first truly useful apps leveraging the technology - instruction manuals served up as AR-enabled mobile applications. These apps will show you, as opposed to telling you, how to perform complicated tasks.
Maarten Lens-FitzGerald is part of our impressive lineup of speakers at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit. As part of our ongoing series of interviews with those speakers, we fired off a round of questions at Lens-FitzGerald to learn a little more about who he is, what he does, and what he'll be talking about at the summit.
RWW: When was the first time you really thought you were going to go into augmented reality? Has that always been something for you?
Lens-FitzGerald: I never thought of going into augmented reality, but cyberspace, any form of digital worlds, have always been one of the things I've been thinking about since I found out about science fiction. One of the first books I read of the cyber punk genre was Bruce Sterling's "Mirror Shades." Mirror shades, meaning, of course, AR goggles. And that book came out in 1988 and ever since, this was my world.
A new iPad app launched this month called Planetary. It visualizes your music collection using the solar system as a metaphor and it's visually stunning. It also seems gimmicky, at first glance. The concept is that stars are music artists, planets are albums and moons orbiting a planet are the album tracks. You can browse and listen to your music as if it was a universe. One reviewer of the app on iTunes coolly dismissed Planetary as "visually appealing but useless." With probably unintentional irony, the reviewer gave Planetary just 2 stars.
With all due respect, that critic is missing the point. Behind the design coolness, Planetary shows how data visualizations will become the new interface to your computing experiences. Whether on your mobile phone, tablet device, or walking along an urban street, increasingly you will control how you interact with apps using data visualizations of the kind offered by Planetary.
