Building augmented reality into Bing Maps

Blaise Aguera y Arcas is an expert in video compression and 3D visualization. He created Seadragon, a visualization technology that was acquired by Microsoft in 2006, to afford one of its products,Photosynth, its seemless digital rendering and zoom capabilities.

In 2007, Aguera y Arcas demoed Photosynth at the TED conference. At that time, I was truly amazed at the product’s ability to revolutionize the way we experience our environment. TED summarized the technology in these terms “a vastly powerful piece of software capable of taking a wide variety of images, analyzing them for similarities, and grafting them together into an interactive three-dimensional space. This seamless patchwork of images can be viewed via multiple angles and magnifications, allowing us to look around corners or “fly” in for a (much) closer look.”

This is the video of his 2007 presentation.

Aguera y Arcas (who works at Microsoft and is the architect of Bing Maps) has upped the ante. During last week’s TED conference in Long Beach, CA, he showcased the next iteration of his technology. It is really a sight to behold and better seen than described; a fantastic preview of things to come.

It is clear that, in fact, Aguera y Farcas created one of the first augmented reality applications before the term was even coined.