Augmented reality on Bing Maps

Last month, Microsoft’s Blaise Aguera y Arcas gave a brilliant demonstration of Bing Maps’ new augmented reality features at TED. With technologies like Surface, Skinput and Project Natal, Microsoft are increasingly one of the most interesting and exciting companies in the user experience space.

Microsoft have really gone to town, challenging Google’s domination of this space, with a raft of cool features, such as Seadragon’s ultra-smooth zooming and panning, 45-degree representation of cities from any cardinal direction and a super-charged version of Google’s Street View.

One of the most exciting elements for me is the integration with Flickr, where geo-tagged images can be mapped (and correctly oriented in 3D space) within the street view. This is extremely powerful, not only for documenting a location using photographs and video content, but also through time. By mapping historical images of a location, users can see how a space has evolved over time.

There’s a whole bunch of more exciting stuff covered in the video, from indoors coverage to night/day representations. Enjoy.