It's the Real World -- With Google Maps Layered on Top (wsj.com) 31
Google has started to roll out augmented reality navigation feature in its Maps app for some users. The company told the Wall Street Journal that the walking-focused feature will be available shortly, but only to Local Guides (community reviewers) at first. The feature will need "more testing" before it's available to everyone else, Google said. Still, this suggests AR route-finding is much closer to becoming a practical reality. Google Maps uses GPS to get a basic idea of where you are, and then relies on the camera to get a much more exact location with 3D arrows hovering over the places you need to turn. Notably, though, Google doesn't want you to rely too heavily on AR to get around.
I want a speed run instead (Score:3)
Although the AR thing sounds like a nice gimmick, I think what would be really useful is something Google could deliver pretty easily - a speed run as it were, a fast video showing me traveling the whole route (street map style view) in about 30 seconds or so, that I could play at any time. I think that would give me just enough visual heads up about what it looks like around where I should turn, without taking up any of my mental processing time while I am actually walking/driving.
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Your suggestion would make walking around so much ea
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Key is visual, not logical (Score:2)
I don't get it, does the google maps app, that reads aloud the directions in real-time, not do the same thing when walking around?
Yeah it says "turn left here" or "go forward 400 feet".
While logically useful I find it distracting, and don't have a good feel for if I'm walking two or four blocks (especially in a city I do not know how large blocks are).
A quick visual run-through paired with instructions like "turn left here" would be fantastic, because I'd know to be ready for a turn a while before I reached
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What ever happened to the good ole days of asking for directions?
Most /.ers are male, and a man would rather be lost for days than ask for directions.
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I think what would be really useful is something Google could deliver pretty easily - a speed run as it were, a fast video showing me traveling the whole route (street map style view) in about 30 seconds or so, ...
And... now we know SuperKendall is Quicksilver [wikipedia.org] IRL.
Non-Paywall link (Score:1)
http://archive.is/9kBNn [archive.is]
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Some say the robots will create enough wealth to feed all the unemployed.
I say the robots will create enough unemployed to feed the robots.
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How many people actually have driven themselves into danger because they followed the GPS over their common sense.
Now I can see accidents because someone was staring at the GPS Screen for too long and not on the road, but ignoring do not enter signs, or going off road confident in the GPS map, that you are willing to drive off a cliff, doesn't seem likely. And besides some bad Sci-Fi stories, I havn't heard much about that. I have heard stories of people getting lost on a long driveway thinking it was a r
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I've driven in some hilly areas of the Rockies with frequent sudden elevation changes. There are parts where the road looks like a cliff, and other parts where the cliff looks like road. Think of a non-grid winding area with lots of intersections and hills, with an intersection frequently being at the top of a hill. The 'cliff' might be more like an embankment that goes down 20 feet, though.
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And of course there was no signage or guardrails.
Haven't seen it yet (Score:2)
And I'm a Local Guide in 3 different regions, one of them in the US.
Unreal (Score:3)
How is this useful? (Score:2)
If I had an Android-powered eyetap device, it might make sense. But who wants to look through their phone as they walk around? We already refer to people who walk around while looking at their phones as zombies, now they're going to have to adopt the classic arms-forward stance in the bargain?
Where this would actually be useful would be in vehicles with a HUD. But AFAIK, there are no cars with a full-window HUD, they can only project into a small area. Some of them are configurable, but none are configurabl
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They tried that with Google Glass, but many users found that they were getting assaulted by people that were paranoid about being recorded.
It's obvious that eyewear, where as some kind of augmented reality headgear that you wear which covers your eyes, or embedded directly into glasses or even contact lenses is going to be the most useful hardware implementation of this tech, but what can you do when society doesn't want to adopt it because of preconceptions they have about how the technology might be g
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what can you do when society doesn't want to adopt it because of preconceptions they have about how the technology might be getting used by early adopters?
First and foremost, don't make it look stupid. There's plenty of almost-normal looking sunglasses with cameras built in. Nobody wants to look like a goddamn gargoyle.
10 years of active AR development... (Score:2)
Will there be something like this for Mass Transit (Score:2)
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chuckle, but what if I fall asleep. Trust me, I see plenty of people zzzzzzzzzzzn out on the Bus every morning.
Try augmenting the 2D viewport, first (Score:2)
Google Maps have yet to fully augment the 2D image of the map that's currently viewable on your screen. Google developers minds are still stuck too closely to the paper maps they're modelling.
A paper map weakness: you can only print the name of the street so many times. One visually finds the line representing the road they want. Then they have to trace their finger up or down that line to find the printed name. Then they can return back to the point on the map they're interested in.
The mobile app still rel
Thank FSM (Score:2)
Last year I tried to use Apple Maps while walking around. It only updates direction via GPS movement so you have to walk a ways in one direction for the arrow to change direction. Took me a while before I was sure I was even walking the right direction. Had to keep looking up to avoid walking into stuff, and down to make sure I was going the right way as it slowly updated. Doesn't help I'm terrible with maps. If self-driving tech wasn't coming so soon, I'd ask for a HUD version of this (perhaps via Google G
Put back the compass rose instead (Score:1)
Hey Google, rather than adding features which aren't legal to use while driving, how about adding back the recently deleted compass rose (which is a feature that's actually necessary to make the Navigator function usable in unfamiliar neighborhoods). Is deleting the compass function a bug or a did someone(who was probably never a Boy Scout) think they could navigate using a app which doesn't have a compass but which gives compass relative directions?
In the last update of Google Maps for Android, I noticed t