Despite boasting one billion users, Google Maps has recently suffered from a harsh withdrawal from some key developers and partners.
Apple, for instance, has recently reported that they might abandon Google Maps for their own mapping application for their smartphones and tablets.
Yet, Google have not been discouraged by all of this negative publicity and went forward with holding a media event yesterday in San Francisco to preview new mapping features as well as glorifying a decade of achievements in digital mapping, including its use of satellite, aerial and street-level views.
So what enhancements shall we see now you ask? Well, a 3D feature for the Google Earth mobile apps was one that surly stood-out, offline access to Google Maps on Android phones was quite intriguing as well. Meanwhile, an initiative called “Google Street View Trekker” will send hipster Googlers off to photograph places that aren’t accessible to Street View cars, trikes and snowmobiles.
“There’s a lot going on in mapping right now, and we wanted to be able to tell our story,” added Brian McClendon, vice president of engineering for Google Maps, in a follow-up conference call with a group of European journalists. “We’re very proud of how far we’ve come in comprehensiveness, accuracy and usability.”
So we shall attempt to summarize the 3 most notable enhancements starting with the 3D cityscapes:
3D is the most attention-grabbing announcement today, although it’s worth emphasizing that it’s part of the Google Earth mobile apps, not Google Maps.
While 3D cities might look pretty, but you might be asking yourself what are the actual benefits to this kind of technology besides swooping virtually over San Francisco or London to show off a smartphone or tablet?
According to Ed Parsons, geospatial technologist at Google, it shall give you the ability to attach information to objects in 3 dimensions; “For example, I’m currently sitting on the sixth floor of an office in Soho, and that’s three-dimensional information. Increasingly, mapping will be more and more 3D both online, and on mobile devices.”
Offline mapping
The Google Maps for Android shall thrill people who want to download a map for a specific city or area before travelling there, thus saving on data usage/costs when they arrive.
Its launch may also encourage more Android users to download the standalone Google Maps app from the Google Play store, rather than wait for their operator / handset maker to push out an update to the Android OS (and thus its embedded maps app).
Contextual cartography
Google’s announcements today play into a wider picture of how digital maps are evolving: the interconnection between the actual mapping data – 3D images included – and all the other data and content floating about in the cloud with location tags.
How can we make sense of that, and produce useful maps that also serve up whatever information and/or content is relevant to that particular person at that particular time?
Well, according to Parsons, for cartography, it’s never been what you actually include on the map rather what you take off. Apparently, they are attempting to take that beyond traditional cartography by implementing their very own augmented reality glasses ( we’re sure you remember those )
Now it’s up to Apple to see how they’ll spice things up, but apparently Google are keen to put up a good fight.
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