Read Write World

Read Write World: Democratizing Locative Media was one of my favorite presentations at the last eComm conference. Blaise Aguera y Aracas, who is an architect at Microsoft, working on projects like the Photosynth and Bing Maps was demonstrating how the new media processing technologies applied to crowdsourced content can bring a completely new kind of user experience.

We already have the Street View, being able to "walk" along just any street on the planet looking at our screens (or better: the Internet glasses). But the discussed project goes even deeper. During your virtual walk you can enter just about any door or a gate and get inside the street - facing building - a shop or a cafe. Then inside walk and look around and then go back to the street and walk it further down... All the content, being made of real pictures taken by real people, is blended together, forming a complete. fully detailed virtual world.

Trekking the Andes, as this blog is posted, I still carry my DSLR camera. My friends already tell me they can find better pictures "on Google". And probably they are right. The other day I laughed on Twitter, saying the camera of the future will have neither lens no shutter and that it will be just recording sensory information - GPS coordinates, compass heading, accelerometer tilt. And based on those coordinates it will download from the Internet the best matching pictures it can find. Going even further I can see a small recorder (or an application) recording all the coordinates continuously. Later on such "trek" will be played using continuous visual content stream from the Internet.