Google’s “Live View” the First Useful Augmented Reality Application
So there I was minding my own business walking around the City of Brotherly Love (Philadelphia) on a weekend visit and my keen sense of misdirection kicked in. I whipped out my iPhone, started Google Maps for some walking directions and I see this odd new button on the bottom labeled “Live View”.
The Live View button sounded interesting so I pressed it. The app went wild showing me some icons instructing me to hold the phone vertically and to swipe it back and forth so that it would “recognize” the view, which if you are in a city is a collection of buildings. The system then replaces the instructions with a live black and white video view of the scene with a directional map on the bottom.
The blue virtual sign matches up with the blue dots on the map (the usual map navigation indicators) and you now know which way to walk! It’s awesome when you walk out of a building or come out to the street from a subway. As you’re walking and holding the phone vertical it only lets you hold it that way for a few seconds before it says: Look where you’re going. When you rotate the phone down to a more normal angle (horizontal to the ground) the Augmented Reality (AR) live video disappears and you get the regular Google Map view. Rotate back to vertical and you get the AR view. If you’re walking down the street and get to a corner where you’re supposed to turn a giant set of rotating arrows appears in the video pointing you the way to turn. It’s a tad overkill but get’s your attention. Overall really nice user interface and clearly some folks put a lot of thought into this.
I was using this on a iPhone 11 Pro Max and don’t have any idea how I got a beta which is indicated on the live video screen.
A couple of items of interest. You only get the “Live View” button if you are using navigation for walking. If it’s set to driving no button. I work in the field of VR and AR and knew that Google was looking to add some AR capabilities to Google Maps but all I had seen was some press about a running Fox or other animal leading you to where you want to go. (Glad that was dumped) AR is getting hyped up to absurd levels but the hardware is still playing catchup. Clearly there is a lot of amazing tech behind this, particularly the image recognition, which is used to enable the app to determine where you are looking. More interesting is the thoughtful user interface that seamlessly integrates an existing app with dramatically new useful functionality in a pretty darn unobtrusive way. Hats off to the Google team for hitting this one out of the park.
