January 20, 2002

Fun with online maps

I remember how amazed I was by online mapservers (how long ago? 1 year? 2 years already?). The idea of typing in an address in something like multimap or streetmap and getting the streetmap with the location highlighted just like that seemed miraculous. Next thing to amaze me was when they started offering up aerial photos aligning perfectly with the map. I've always like maps for that feeling they give me of flying over the land, seeing things hidden at street level.

When my company moved offices recently, I started walking to work. I enjoyed trying out different routes but inevitably ended up trying to optimise it. So it was with childish glee that I called up aerial photos of my neighbourhood, stitched them together in Photoshop and drew in on successive layers my alternative routes, and measured them. It's not that much different from what was possible a hundred years ago with hand-drawn maps, but somehow this felt like science fiction.

I wonder what people will take for granted a decade from now. Real-time satellite imagery is awesome enough. I'm fully expecting the ability to order up photorealistic ground-level walkthroughs of any part of the world (the bits the powers that be let us see). Which is a close approximation of another childhood daydream.

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