Category Archives: maps

July 5, 2010

The Indoor Mall Local Search Problem

By Mok Oh

I’m sitting in a pretty sizable mall (Natick Mall in MA near Boston) and thinking about how a mirror-world local search would work. In other words, think about how a use can browse to the Natick Mall, walk around this space immersively, walk into stores, and shop like in real life?  How would EveryScape implement this?  How would Bing or Google do this?

Natick Mall Partial Panorama

I snapped a few photos and created a partial panorama above within a few minutes using my iPhone 4 and AutoStitch.  You can see more than a dozen shops from a simple image like this, and it can give you a pretty good insight into what the space is like.

How can I get the “crowd” to do this for me?  Will Foursquare/Gowalla-like approach work?  How well is the photo-crowd sourcing working?  How do we solve the GPS problem for indoors?

1 comment   |  tags: | posted in Local Search, maps, mirror worlds, panorama, Photography

August 10, 2009

Tribe Sourcing, Crowd Sourcing, and Automation

By Mok Oh
Floating Drones!

Floating Drones!

UPDATE: A friend of mine told me about an article on the New York Times about a floating drone the army’s working on!  Automatic photo acquisition technology is closer than we think.

Cab Sourcing

Cab Sourcing the Panoramic Photography Data Collection

When you are mass producing something repeatedly, you absolutely want automation as much as possible. Machines typically produce less error and are more consistent than humans for very specific tasks. But when you can’t, for one reason or another, going for either crowd sourcing or tribe sourcing makes a heap of sense. This doesn’t mean that automation has no place — it means automation takes on a different role.

Let’s be a bit more specific.

In my context, I’m talking about taking ba-zillitons of photographs from a human perspective (as opposed to a satellite perspective) and making sense of it for users. There are companies like Google, EveryScape, Microsoft, Tele Atlas, and NavTeq, that go around photographing the world for online use. Let’s focus on photographic data collection as a “case study” for this blog.

So the right set of questions in this context may be:  Can we automate the picture-taking process? If not, can we tap into the crowd?  How about creating a tribe?

Star Wars Darth Maul Droids

Star Wars Darth Maul Droids

Well, automating the photography of the entire world would be tough. One future solution could be to create lots of robots that walk, drive, or fly around acquiring and geotagging pictures.  NERD ALERT!  Remember Star Wars Episode 1, where Darth Maul sent out floating droids in Tatooween to find Princess Amidala? Something like that.  Unfortunately, we don’t have these droids yet.  (Can someone get on that???)

So, when automation isn’t possible, the next question is: Can we crowd source?  I’m not certain if we can crowd source this yet either, since car-mounted camera systems aren’t something we can buy at Best Buy. I don’t think it’s that far off either.  We may see panoramic cameras mounted on taxis — what I call cab sourcing — for instance. There are a few logistical, business-related, and technical issues that needs to be solved before this can happen, but why not?

Microsoft’s Photosynth harnesses the power of the crowd to make sense of a real place, but it’s yet to be seen that this technology can conquer the world.  (In fact, I’m looking forward to a new research publication coming out this September).

Google Street View Car

Google Street View Car

Tribe sourcing is the viable solution for now — find leadership, enable and incentivize the tribe to go out and photograph the world according to some plan. Google has the cash to create (quite wonderfully equipped) cars and have folks drive around. EveryScape’s found a cost-effective solution for this to tribe source (a.k.a. The Ambassador Program).

Until automation can happen, photographic data collection happens with tribes (or crowds).  Automation plays a role in that pictures are taken, geotagged, oriented, stitched, and processed automatically.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in 2.5D, maps, mirror worlds, panorama

July 28, 2009

A9 and Streetside: Why Did They Fail?

By Mok Oh
Amazon A9 Maps

Amazon A9 Maps

Before EveryScape and Google Street View existed (and yes, we were doing this before Google was), there were a couple of attempts of street-level photography by companies you might have heard of: Amazon and Microsoft.

Amazon had their A9 Block View (shown above) and Microsoft  had (has?) their Streetside.

My question is: Why did they fail?

In some sense, their intensions were the same as EveryScape and Google — to enable users to virtually see places, businesses, points of interest from the comfort of your browser for various use cases and applications.

One obvious “feature” difference is that they did not use panoramic imagery.  One could argue that panoramic imagery is more immersive and experiential.

Does panoramic imagery make that much of a difference?  Isn’t one of the beauties of the Web is that “keep it simple, stupid” wins?

Or are the users really looking for richer online experiences?  A better UI/UX (a la Apple and iPhone)?  Were their approach limiting feature wise?

More questions than answers, unfortunately.  Facts or biases, your feedback is appreciated.

3 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in maps, Photography

July 10, 2009

Crowd Sourcing vs. Tribe Sourcing

By Mok Oh

Google Maps new geolocation feature -- now you can share your location on Google Map

Google Maps new geolocation feature -- now you can share your location on Google Map

Yesterday, Google Maps launched a geolocation feature.  When you click on the small blue dot on the upper-left controls, it will try to figure out where you are using Wi-Fi.  It’s a pretty darn cool feature.  Well, Skyhook‘s been doing that much longer than Google has and definitely has a better product at this point (your Google Map on your iPhone uses Skyhook!  Things that make you go hm…).  Hold this thought.  I’ll return to my point about this in a bit.

This blog is not about Google getting their tentacles into many different markets.  (We had that experience and Galen Moore of Mass High Tech quoted me quite well in his article.)  That’s definitely a multi-part blog for some other time.

I want to talk more about crowd sourcing vs. tribe sourcing in this blog.  I think people have a decent idea of what crowd sourcing is.  So, what is tribe sourcing?  Tribe sourcing is when you have not everyone involved; much less but focused set of folks doing the sourcing.  Crowds can create lots and lots of data, but have many different intensions — their “intension vectors,” if you will, are not aligned, hence creating lots of noise as well.  So, in order to gather what you want from this vast amounts of information, you have to filter accordingly.  Meaning, make some assumptions, process, and potentially make some guesses as to what that means.

Now, let’s take the example of what I initially mentioned about Google geolocation vs. Skyhook geolocation.  Sources say that Google’s geolocation feature is not as good.  It turns out that’s because they are crowd sourcing their info. From Wade Roush’s article:

“[Google] quietly gathers local readings every time someone uses a Google app on an iPhone or a Blackberry, or some other mobile device.”

As opposed to Skyhook’s tribe-sourced data:

“Skyhook’s own approach is to send Wi-Fi-sensing vehicles down every highway, street, and alley, methodically establishing the position and strength of every access point they pass.”

Skyhook may have much less quantity of people contributing to their data, but they have a very focused tribe gathering the right data.  Their intension vectors are very well aligned in collecting the data in a structured and optimal way for this particular application.

So, which one’s better?  It’stoo early to tell but my bias is Skyhook (and has nothing to do with the fact that I know Ted Morgan and folks at Skyhook fairly well).  Is tribe sourcing better than crowd sourcing?  Vice versa?  More specifically, when will Google’s data/product be better than Skyhook’s?  I don’t know, but time will tell.

Yet another question:  Why combine and do both?  Google’s everywhere (including Android) and seemingly has unlimited resources, so they can.  I think Skyhook can too.  Perhaps the answer lies in somewhere in the balance between the crowd and the tribe.

8 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in maps

July 9, 2009

What About the Inside?

By Mok Oh

About a year ago in 2008, I had the privilege to speak in front of the Where 2.0 2008 audience.  The topic was titled, “What About the Inside?” (Online video link here.)  I’m bringing this up again since the question is still valid — in some sense much more valid now than before.  What was the context?  It was a question meant not only for the Where 2.0 audience, but also meant for the GIS, mapping, GPS, 3D/2D imaging, government/civic, architectural and urban planning, and any community of people who were doing any work that gathers information and interacts with interior places and spaces we live.

The premise was that we have an unnatural bias towards mapping the outside spaces more so than the inside.  Perhaps it has some historical significance, where outside spaces were the final frontier.  Well, that’s no longer true, since much of the earth’s outdoors has been mapped, explored, marked.  GPS, satellite and aerial imaging, smart software algorithms (e.g. image registration), and the Moore’s Law definitely changed the landscape of how we can gather information for the outside.  Now we even have ground-level imagery from Google, EveryScape, etc., and we can zoom around places virtually.

But what about the INSIDE spaces?  I surely don’t want to stop at just the entrance to a place I want to visit.  I want to go INSIDE!  Perhaps the right question is: How can I experience of the inside spaces of every interior space I’d like to visit?  Yeah, it’s a big question.  And in this context, by “I,” I mean for every single person who uses the internet.  There are definitely issues such as privacy, no GPS, no aerial photos, multiple floors/levels, etc. that question existing technologies and solutions, since they don’t seem to “map” that well for the interiors.

Please check out my Where 2.0 2008 presentation video and I would love to hear your thoughts.  And below is the clip of an EveryScape eye-candy commercial.

5 comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in maps, panorama, Photography

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