Perspectives

What’s the future of the active map?

The instantly-updated map provides a sense of magic, as in the “Marauder’s Map” that is so central to Harry Potter’s edge against his pursuers. Within that fictional map context, there are details of every nook and cranny of the school grounds, including secret passages, as well as the name and location of every person in real-time. With today’s mobile technology, we’ve achieved some of this magic with friend finder services that allow us to see the location of those within our circles, but what other kinds of instantly-updated information could prove beneficial that we don’t yet have?

Many are discovering the power of tuning their view via maps for business advantage. The incorporation of sensing technologies, along with location, opens up whole new inputs on what is going on around us. Passive sensors, and active input from individuals, give action to maps and provide a living view that can’t be matched with any other tools or technology. The active map is increasingly within our reach, and it certainly has the transforming capacity equated with magic.

Professional Guides

The ability to view a number of different spatial information inputs onto a local view has allowed us to analyze and better understand our surroundings. While this capability has long been applied in business settings, it has begun to reach new levels of professional relevance in such areas as real estate sales. With real estate portals like Zillow, maps provide the context for constantly updated views of the dynamic real estate market with clear market advantages. The public sees pricing and features in context with neighbor pricing to do a great deal of armchair exploration without wasting a realtor’s time, and the realtor gains better market perspective while streamlining the sales process.

There are many more professions where the detailed local view that allows us to explore offerings, price and proximity provides a clear market advantage. One can also think of great value in fieldwork professions such as construction, maintenance and repair where a real-time view of conditions greatly streamlines the work. Understanding the job in the context of place, materials and work conditions (such as weather or safety considerations) often requires a time-consuming visit to the site to understand context. Getting this detailed view remotely would save both time and resources.

Navigating Offerings

Online maps are focused heavily on the local marketing networks, with business-to-consumer marketing the driving force behind their success. The more real-time and detailed information that we have regarding the stores, restaurants and entertainment options around us, the more we will be influenced by what we can explore, and the more we use mapping to find information, the more features will be added.

The battle over online map platforms as marketing hubs means that new local mapping functionality is offered regularly, with indoor mapping of store contents one of the latest offerings. As indoor spaces begin to be mapped to include store shelves and layouts, we can expect much easier means to capture these indoor details for regular and even real-time updates so that our maps come alive with what’s happening around us. Imagine seeing the prices on the shelves with the ability to compare and calculate price difference based on proximity and the time it takes to get you to the store. Or imagine a night on the town where you know the atmosphere and entertainment quality of restaurants and bars around you with a quick look at your phone rather than a door-to-door search for what you’re after.

Planning in Context

The ability to map accurately and completely is on a continuing upward spiral. We now have the ability to collect and represent our data in three dimensions with increasing accuracy. We’ll start to unlock more meaning from our mapped data as this realism reveals details about the relationships within our physical world. With more and more realism, we’ll make plans and designs with a greater context of place informing our decisions, where the more we know about our surroundings the better we’ll be able to realize an optimal configuration.

The surge of three dimensional representations provides better context for information that allows us to view and visit areas virtually prior to travel. This realistic view is quickly translating to our handheld device with augmented reality views that place what we see with details of interest overlaid upon them. This combination of the real and the digital is a natural progression of where the Internet is headed, and it brings both sensored information and curated information into the sphere of what we’re seeing.

The ability to navigate our surroundings through a lens that is overlaid with details that interest us is the ultimate active map, delivering the information we want when we want it. When considering the implications of all this real-time information in context, particularly with the thought that it will be delivered through wearables like glasses or contact lenses, the very notion of a map disappears.

Resources

• Marauder’s Map, Harry Potter Wiki
• Augmented Reality Check, Ericsson Business Report #3, 2011 (PDF)