Take a moment to check out this video which shows some of the content that Blaise presented at TED today. There are two key features: integration and matching of photographs to our human scale imagery, and the integration of the world wide telescope. These features are pretty cool, but ultimately it is the whole idea of the mapping ecosystem that is the real winner.
The Street Shots app, which matches images to our human scale experience has a couple of really nice emergent qualities. The human scale imagery, in some sense, is more useful the more objective it is – matching images can really bring a place alive by capturing a human moment or event.
Secondly, when someone has uploaded an historical image, once can experience a location with a view to a different age. Here is a picture of Vancouver from 1890.
