Nokia Unveils a Maps Service | Hacker News Reader

Nokia Unveils a Maps Service

here.com

109 pointssravfeyn70 comments

Related article http://www.technologyreview.com/news/507186/nokia-unveils-a-map-service-that-lives-in-the-cloud/

a Maps Service that Lives in the Cloud

What does that mean? Honestly, I do not understand it. Name-dropping the "cloud"? Is that meant to be negative or positive? Any big map service is bound to run on multiple redundant machines, isn't that the cloud?

Seeing http://static.here.sc/maps/39568/core/features/intropage/img... I cringe. Measuring distances like that does not work in the field, you can almost never walk in a straight line. Distances must be calculated by appropiate means of travel, eg streets for cars/bicycles or ways and walkable areas for pedestrians. Somewhere at Nokia a team of cartographers must be sobbing into their glasses of beer.

Looking at random places I know, I can debunk their claim of "Most accurate map". OpenStreetMap is more accurate at those. (Anecdote!)

This leads to my next critic. They want people fix/enhance the map data for them. But then it is NOT shared back, only as map image. The data stays with Nokia and you probably cannot even export your own contributions. Same as Google really.

Adding "social" to a map service is a great idea. I was always wondering why none of the big players did that.

The 3D stuff is amazing.

The headline is taken from the article http://www.technologyreview.com/news/507186/nokia-unveils-a-...

I believe by cloud, they mean that the service can be accessed by any device with a browser, removing the necessity for a 'Maps App'.

So... like Google Maps?

Wow, this is going to be one spectacular flop.

Or how to turn something ridiculously simple (go to here.com to get Nokia Maps on your iPhone, since this is probably what Nokia is aiming at here) into an incomprehensible buzzword soup.

Personally I liked their older model - a map and nav service that lived entirely on the handset. You could take the whole world with you, which is very useful in some of the more remote areas (like parts of Australia).

You still can...

uh... good! Is that available on their Win Phones too?

Not that I'm looking at buying nokia any time soon, I only replaced my N900 with a Galaxy Note earlier this year.

One of the big draws of Nokia Maps on Windows Phone is that you can download offline maps of the entire world.

...and on all of the Symbian^3 crowd of phones as well. Quite a lifesaver when travelling around Europe and not wanting to get gouged on roaming data charges.

Yes, Windows Phone 8 has offline maps.

I believe here.net works also in offline mode with HTML5 local storage, at least the old Nokia maps version did. Maybe the 'collections' feature stores the actual data on your phone.

>Measuring distances like that does not work in the field, you can almost never walk in a straight line.

I agree with you on everything but this. It's really useful to have a ballpark walking time estimate in a new city. It gives you a sense of scale. London has similar distance circles on their outdoor maps and it's quite helpful.

But measuring distance over the actually existing possible routes is much more accurate and honest. See these random examples: http://resources.esri.com/help/9.3/arcgisdesktop/com/gp_tool... and http://blog.lib.umn.edu/levin031/transportationist//WalkingM...

Granted, this either needs more processing power server-side or a data model where the network (street, areas, etc) data is actually available on the client machine to calculate it.

edit: http://www.mysociety.org/2006/travel-time-maps/ is a very nice detailed write-up about those maps.

In both examples, concentric circles are a pretty good approximation. Considering that the 15-minute walk area will have high variability due to walking speed and traffic lights, detailed contours just give a false sense of accuracy. Like a bathroom scale that reports your weight to nine digits.

Don't get me wrong, I love travel time maps in the right context. I actually made an interactive travel time map for transit in Toronto. It only works in Chrome but can be found here: http://ttcvis.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/

Thanks for the link in the edit, I love write-ups of data visualizations and from a quick skim this looks really interesting.

It would be interesting experiment to implement the distance measurement as "contour lines". Take random points from the map, measure how long it takes to walk there from current point, draw 5min, 10min, 15min etc curves.

Check out http://www.mysociety.org/2006/travel-time-maps/ or http://www.nctcog.org/trans/data/traveltimes/

The mysociety one just got revamped and relaunched recently

http://www.mysociety.org/2012/11/08/mapumental-property-laun...

By using the term 'cloud' I think they're pitching it against traditional sat-nav style apps that require a large up-front map-pack download.

The measuring distances thing is not really a big deal in my opinion. Many apps do the same thing. Yelp does a search in this area view, which I've used and thought was a good implementation of searching in a map. Foursquare has a similar feature as well. The distance may not be entirely accurate, but it is good enough, and probably a better UI model.

> Name-dropping the "cloud"?

You must be new around here. :/

Edit: My favorite link of the past few months indicated the percentage of people who believed that bad weather would affect cloud services.

http://www.techspot.com/news/49980-majority-of-americans-bel...

Hey, if you're on Amazon East there's a correlation.

Er, um... you got me there.

Nice little experience as an Opera user when enabling the 3D view. It recognised my browser and explained quite simply how to enable WebGL. (Go to opera:config#UserPrefs|EnableWebGL and set the value to 1).

I think other websites could learn something from this, instead of thrusting a link to 'upgrade' my browser to chrome or safari or flat out failing.

Their street view is horrendously low quality. Would have thought that if you were going to go to the effort of mapping out streets (quite extensively too), you'd use high definition cameras.

FWIW, it's okay for me (London).

I just checked London, and quality is definitely subpar to Google's Street View

Central London - the imagery is horrendously low quality. Looks like camera tech from 6 years ago.

From 2006? Was camera technology really improved that much since then?

Absolutely it has. Resolution, noise, dynamic range have all improved dramatically since 2006. Compare the Canon 5d (1) from 2006 and the 5d Mk3 from this year - pretty decent comparison. It is no contest.

I was quite impressed they actually have a street view! Not sure which city you tried, but I just zoomed in on a random street in Helsinki, and it seems to be good enough to read some license plates (they might want to fix that).

Oh sure, I was impressed and surprised too. I was also impressed that it was WebGL rather than flash. That said - if you're going to spend a hell of a lot of money sending people into the streets of both major and minor cities - you might as well give them good cameras.

Yeah, image quality seems to be lower than in google streetview, but it also runs much smoother at least on my machine.

The streetview was made by Navteq using a Ladybug 3 camera, which is a pretty sad camera to use for this application. It is not very high resolution, it is intended more for panoramic video than for high resolution streetview-type capture. It also needs a ton of post production in order to look good.

The aerial data for my location are at least 8 years old and very low quality. It's interesting to see so back into history but not really useful.

edit: comparing it to other sources, it seems like it's from 2003

Literally every single business (34 of them) within a quarter mile or so radius of my home is wrong. Either closed, grossly in the wrong place, or never existed in the first place.

You didn't mention where you live. Canada? Australia? China? UK? Brazil?

Boston.

Ditto...Mountain View, California.

Really impressed by the fluent 3D view and the exploration mode for some cities. Good job Nokia!

None of the map tiles are retina-optimized, it looks terribly blurry on my iPhone. Also it doesn't try to autocomplete addresses as I type them in, I find that super helpful on all other map apps. Absolutely nothing makes me want to use this again.

What does "retina-optimized" mean ? Apple's love of closed systems has not yet extended to requiring specially processed images for optimal display on Apple hardware...

It means that Apple marketing worked on flyosity.

retina-optimized

We've got marketing departments to thank for that one. Leave it to them to invent another word for "high resolution".

Although, I suppose there probably was a need for a new word. "HD" has been strongly tied to 720p/1080p, so people associate "HD" with those qualities. They needed something that was more HD, without resorting to the silly name progression that was used in radio. (HF, VHF, UHF, etc)

There are quite a few standard denominations for resolution : ★VGA, ★XGA, Q★XGA etc. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_display_resolution for the whole collection.

And then there is the ★HD family : nHD, qHD, HD (720p), FHD (1080p), QHD, QFHD (4K), UHD... Those are established and provide a somewhat logical progression from HD.

But then I may just underestimate Apple's need for branding and the prevalence of NIH at the marketing department.

VGA/XGA/QXGA is good technical denominations, but good luck marketing an abstract acronym. "HD" works as a marketing term because, somewhere along the line, everyone knew it was short for "High-Definition".

I consider myself a techie, and even I didn't know that "VGA" was "Video Graphics Array", and "XGA" is "eXtended Graphics Array". Nor would those phrases mean anything to the layman, even if they did know.

Didn't realize this was posted higher than the other one. Anyhoo, I was initially unimpressed because I zoomed into Paris and the 3D view didn't work very well, but I discovered Toronto.

http://i.imgur.com/ldgtc.jpg

And you can view it yourself here: http://here.net/43.6461465,-79.3878013,15.9,349,72,3d.day

Very visually impressive and doubly so that it runs in my browser without any extra plugins and at such a smooth level.

I'm impressed by how good the 3D view looks. Good to see that a company that is struggling is still trying to innovate.

Related article by TechnologyReview http://www.technologyreview.com/news/507186/nokia-unveils-a-...

"Here is available through a Web browser and as an iPhone app." Anyone know how to get the iPhone app? Doesn't come up on the store.

EDIT: Ah, the answer comes later: "Skillman also showed off the iPhone version of Here, which will be available as a free app in the next several weeks."

Anybody managed to get an API key for this service ? Seems that http://developer.here.net/myapps (which is linked elsewhere in the site and looks like the url for a developer dashboard) is broken (even when you're signed in or at least trying to sign in with a legit nokia developer account).

Routing in the UK is much better on here.net than in Apple iOS6 Maps. Will Nokia release the iOS app?

Would Apple approve it?

Vancouver satellite imagery is over three years old. Geolocation by Canadian postal code less accurate than Google or Bing.

Though points for detecting my browser and telling me how to enable WebGL for the 3D functionality, and Toronto 3D is pretty good.

Awkward 3 or 4 different interfaces with different ways to transition between them in each one. Links that go nowhere / don't really work / leave UI that doesn't move when you zoom. A decent effort, but less finished than even Apple's result.

The 3d view is pretty impressive, although opening the webinspector crashed my Mac :(

I just tried 2 searches. My current address, and my current city. Both failed. Google maps handles them no problem. They could have the best data and nicest maps, but if their search sucks, what's the point?

Not sure what all the comments about the "amazing 3D" are about. Apple's 3D maps implementation is infinitely better (not that 3D maps are in the slightest bit useful...)

Now curious - can you post a screenshot of how the Royal Ontario Museum 'crystal' building looks like in Apple Maps? It's at 100 Queens Park, Toronto, ON. This is Here's view looking approximately west-south-west: http://i.imgur.com/psWne.jpg

The collision detection on the 3D view is strange. When you hit an object, the zoom level is decreased until you clear the object (in this case the top of a building).

satellite image quality outside of major cities seems way better than on google maps, at least for some of the places in Ireland that I tried, i.e.

Here: http://here.net/53.3395769,-6.5376296,18,0,0,hybrid.day

Google maps: http://goo.gl/maps/V55lW

Edit: fixed google maps url

haha, Ireland, i.e. - I see what you did there.

The tilted 3D view has the same sort of skewing that Apple's new maps app has. Anyone know what it might be about the algorithms that make them do that?

Both are using C3's data. C3 is a company that provided 3D data to NOKIA for the first version of 3D maps released two years ago and NOKIA made a terrible mistake to allow Apple to buy it and use C3's 3D data for their own maps. The mesh simplification algorithm used is based on edge collapses according to an error threshold, hence the strange skewing.

Disclaimer: I worked for NOKIA L&C on 3D + cloud + navigation.

btw, hitta.se used the same(similar?) technology many years ago, but it required java or maybe even some proprietary plugin to be used. Don't know why it's gone now as it worked pretty good, and it had 3d coverage of cities that neither apple nor nokia has now :/

Do you know if apple and nokia bought exclusive rights, or why would hitta suddenly drop the feature?

Yes, hitta.se used C3 (Java IIRC). I believe it was their pilot project as both companies are from Sweden (possibly with government/universities involvement) and they used airplane stereovision to generate 3D, which would explain fantastic detail of the whole Sweden (I remember looking at the funny rotated skyscraper in Malmo). To be honest, I don't know why did hitta.se drop its 3D maps. I was playing with hitta.se before NOKIA bought the technology from C3 and there were internal rumors that C3 will be acquired. I would assume licensing costs were the main culprit; given the use of airplane flyovers, the data extraction was very expensive.

Why are they rerouting here.com to here.net? Why use the .net if you have the .com?

Whoa, trees are modeled in 3D.

Central Tokyo has about as much information as central Pyongyang.

ran into an odd bug right off the bat - "directions" generates a proper turn-by-turn list of directions, but the map pane goes blank rather than displaying the route.

What an abysmal name. Most of the time you use a web-based map and at least half the time you use a mobile map, you are not looking at "here" but where you want to go.

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