If immersive but not intrusive, I would be thrilled to use this (shoot me a note if you’re already working on it!). It would make skiing a bit safer, a bit more fun, yet would not turn the experience in nature into something tainted by technology.

I don’t want this tool for visiting a park. Nor sitting in my home. Nor while at a restaurant, or while writing or reading a book. Yet I do have my mobile phone handy, or often have my eyes on it, in these situations, so subconsciously I am not strictly dividing my attention away from technological augmentation in these situations. So perhaps there will be a slowly expanding sphere of use for such a tool, from my ski goggles to my sunglasses.

The unseen world

Google Maps has an augmented reality style navigation experience. It is not truly augmented reality, in that the user is immersed. In my view, nothing is AR when glanced at through the phone, thus is just augmented pseudo-reality.

It is not a revolutionary feature, but points toward the future. There is a great advantage to being able to navigate a labyrinthine city without constantly staring at the phone, or pausing at each corner to glance at a map. One way of avoiding this is to not navigate at all, but simply to wander.

Life does not always work this way, however. We sometimes, often really, need to get where we are going. In days far behind us we may have relied entirely on signs. We still can really: many roads tell us where to turn based on our destination, while town streets and walking paths sometimes have signs saying which way to the post office or the train station or the museum.

Google’s AR navigation creates these signs in real time: sometimes it is just an arrow, pointing toward the destination the user inputs. It also can add markers in the camera view indicating the name of POIs in the distance, making it easy to see through walls and city blocks when wanting to add a spontaneous detour.

Yet the whole time your chin is down, looking into the phone, or your arm extended, holding the phone to your eyes. It’s not ideal, and we all know it. It is a deal breaker, really.

To be immersed in a 3d world model, we also want to not see the model. We want to see the real world, but be able to search it, to receive cues and information about it. It is not just a “hands-free”, but an “eyes-free” scenario.

Labyrinth of Labyrinths

I would guess many an article, when talking about HD maps, digital twins, 3d models of the earth, and so on have quoted Jorge Luis Borges. Specifically, a single paragraph short story about a map of the empire, that reaches a 1:1 scale and is later forgotten. This is nice, but misses the mark on both the future of maps and on Borges’ ability to inform us. The future map is not 1:1, nor needs to be, but it has some wacky puzzles about time, space, alternative paths, and unknowable aspects that our technology and minds have yet to solve.

I have read almost everything Borges has written, from takes of back alley knife fights to praise of eternal libraries to strange other worlds to labyrinthine views of consciousness. He was no cartographer nor technologist, and in fact was quite blind by the time he died of cancer in Geneva. He does not provide us a model for the future, nor a prophecy, but inspiration perhaps.

Consider a spatial view of the world in our minds and computers, the concept of a map, like Borges describes a book being:

“A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.”

Consider how maps reflect what we need and want to see, and sometimes distort reality to serve our needs or views:

“A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.”

Consider the constantly changing world that maps must adapt and heal to reflect as if they are a stable truth:

“Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.”

On mixed reality, a map of the world or the world of the map, our human eyes and brain looking at the phone and getting back spatial information about the world around us:

“It only takes two facing mirrors to build a labyrinth.”

There are many more gems, but I recommend to read his stories. The Aleph is perhaps the best one that could make us think about the idea of trying to make a copy of reality that we reference, or The Library of Babel to consider the complexity and convolution of information systems. All of it has some relevance to the puzzle of aggregating spatial knowledge of the whole world, and serving it out to anyone, anywhere, as their own knowledge.

We are the map

Probably the biggest challenge of future mapping is that it is a constant labor to take a snapshot of the world and index it. The world is constantly changing, but even if so, it is too big, in a fractal sense, to turn into a comprehensive map without an enormous decentralized method of mapping.

Games like Pokemon Go attempt to decentralize the data collection. Communities like OpenStreetMap also do it. Mapillary, OpenAerialMap, Flickr, Foursquare, and many others all look to aggregate data from many individuals.