In 2007 (that is 3 years ago!) Blaise Aguera y Arcas, along with Microsoft, astonished us by presenting the Seadragon and Photosynth technology. It was, and still is very very impressing and embedded below.
On this years TED conference he was at it again – and – astonishing everyone again with an augmented reality “intelligent” map application. It is amazing what his team manage to develop!
The obvious competitor is Google Maps which probably has a better grip at the market. However, Google does not compete at all with the technology presented at TED – although they do have more users – and maybe an easier solution fitting more users?
Microsoft recently launched their new controller for the XBox 360 called Natal. The idea is similar to the Wii’s eye and consists of movement tracking as interface to the XBox. The Natal looks pretty amazing, at least in the demo video. The software developer in my almost instantly thought of ideas to systems which could benefit from such interface, or at least be interesting to further examine. Map systems must be developed for this! Dragging, dropping, altering and jumping in Google Earth would be quite amazing. For more boring commercial application, the idea of a common (totally) virtual scribble board with the addition of a live video conference would be interesting to see.
I challenge thus, all developers which can, or have, got their hands on the XBox Natal and an application development kit to integrate (primarily) map systems and more advanced GIS’s – as well as making commercial applications for this! Are you up for the challenge? Is there even an SDK (or similar) for this?
It seems that other’s have also thought of exploiting this metaphor. Over at the Google Geo Developers blog they have an example similar to this. However, I find my implementation of the metaphor somewhat more intuitive and less intrusive towards the disorientation (cognitive load). What do you think?
Anyhow, the important aspect is that there seems to be a potential in this metaphor and I expect that more implementations/applications of this would occur :)
original post:
This is a follow-up to my post on the magnifier-metaphor prototype. I came across a video of a presentation of Microsofts newest prototype for the Surface “board” called Second Light. Fairly complex technology and everything, but the foundational idea (the wow!) is that you have a “magnifier” over an image and you can “see-through” that image and reveal “hidden” information. Sounds familiar? Well, yeah, I think it’s quite similar to my idea – which is nice:)
The technology is show-cased by Microsoft using maps, aerial-photos, real-life image and text. This inspired me to tweak my prototype to incorporate a little more wow (off course it already has, but a bit more abstract wow :)). You can see the new prototypes and the Microsoft presentation further down.
Microsoft enables this metaphor using highly complex, expensive, non-commercial technology and probably it will be some years before the regular man-in-the-street can get a Surface table. However the technology could be set aside and for instance using a more virtual approach like my scrapped-together prototypes indicate.
If I had more time and more gadgets I would like to see this type of functionality implemented in an IPhone or HTC G2 (Android phone) or similar devices. I strongly believe this is a nice way to navigate an information space, especially with spatial information. (Call for prototypes! :))
Right shifted magnifier
Controls:
Zoom: Mousewheel scroll recommended (standard Google Maps)
Show/hide magnifier: Single rapid left click
Centered magnifier
Additionally experimented with opacity on the magnifier layer to see affects on orientation problems
Controls:
Zoom (with magnifier): Single (rapid) left click.
Show/hide magnifier: Single right click
Otherwise standard Google Maps controls
Microsofts presentation of Second Light – note the wow-factor for aerial/map.
Update:
Ideas for other information-layers
Ground: Metro-map. Magnifier: Area map
Ground: Data-structures (Graphs, trees etc). Magnifier: Map of som sort:)