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Comment by groby_b | Hacker News Reader

* Mapping the physical world

Ever wanted a floor plan for your home? Just wave your phone around.

* Visual annotation

Add direction overlays, see the plan for a play your team is executing on the helmet HUD, highlight "dangerous"(weaving, too fast, whatnot) drivers on the car HUD.

* Integrate sensor data to extend human perception

Add an IR overlay. Sample sound across the room, do a volumetric display of noise levels. "see" the strength of your WiFi signal.

* Image post processing

You have a 3d map of an area, plus pictures of all textures - rearrange to your hearts content.

* Alternate Reality

Completely change the look of the world around you, just because you can. (Semi-useful application: Interior decoration. See that couch right in your living room before you buy it)

There are tons of applications there. It mixes the "reality" of physical space with the malleability of the digital space.

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I think I'm a neo-luddite.

I don't think you're a luddite. With any technology like this, it's important to ask: what applications does this really enable and will those applications simply be a waste of time.

This is an unveiling of a technology but the "applications" they show in this video are probably a waste of time to most users. Google have not shown a killer app that uses this tech. Maybe they're working on something (they hint that they may be planning to integrate indoor mapping into Google Maps which might be interesting) but they're not showing it in this video.

That doesn't mean the tech is bad. But we haven't seen enough to judge it as useful to end users.

Google has acknowledged that their vision of where this is going is, at best, partial: "While we may believe we know where this technology will take us, history suggests we that should be humble in our predictions. We are excited to see the effort take shape with each step forward."

I liked this part.

Google Maps already has indoor maps.

Yeah but they even said in the video that they struggle with indoor navigation and positioning.

This has applications even for, uh, "normal" people. For example, online real estate portals. People who are house-hunting would probably appreciate floorplans or a 3D tour. Agents, landlords or property developers would be able to easily create those with their mobile device.

>Agents, landlords or property developers would be able to easily create those with their mobile device

But they won't! It is very difficult to get those people to post more than a low res picture of one room online when they can very easily walk through the house with a video camera, for example. Even large apartment complexes have 1-2 pictures on their website and call it a day.

I'm currently house hunting (in Sweden) and most real estate agents go for full on visual overload. Everybody has at least 30+ 'artistic' photos. Most also have nice videos of the house on their site. Some even have clever 360 panorama thingies. I basically never watch them as they add nothing of value.

The single most important thing, for me, is a nice and correct 2D floor plan. Add to that 5-10 well chosen photos and you're done on the visual front as far as I'm concerned. If you haven't convinced to at least go look at the house with that, no video or interactive 3D model is going to change my mind.

The big problem is that the overlap between the information I consider important and the information the real estate agent is eager to share don't overlap all the much

Nail in the head.

I have chatted with one of the agents about how do they work, and no surprise - they lend out everything by phone, because "uploading pictures to website takes 24 hours."

Indeed. Panoramic photo VR tours were also gonna be the next big thing for real estate (remember QTVR?) but that only made sense for one-of-a-kind high end properties. Everything else is a commodity.

I used to work for one of the largest real estate portals in Europe, and people seldom watched the video of a property (if available). We also added floorplans from floorplanner.com and that converted way better. Now 25% of the listed properties has one.

To be honest, 25% is a very low number for such an essential piece of information about the property. Do you mind sharing how often people look at floor plans on your portal?

I'm a Russian living in the UK and it still surprises me that what Russians consider to be a viable information about property (gross internal and net internal area, kitchen area and a floor plan) is so rarely present on the UK property sites. "Lovely 2-bedroom" is all you normally expect.

That's because 99% of UK housing comes in a single standard size --- `XS`.

Do you see a lot of agents using Photosynth to give 3D tours ? It has been out for 4 years.

Sure with embedded in a smartphone would be more convenient, but I'm sure agents have some cameras when they get in houses.

I pretty much stopped reading when they were going through the possible applications. Find my way around a super-store, shit I'd rather just stay out if at all possible.

In the meantime, I'm sure this will revolutionize something. It always does. I'm just in your same position ... a neo-luddite.

Also, I would much rather have a space elevator than a 3D mapping phone.

The 3D mapping phone gets you the space elevator, because you need AI lab-assistants / engineers / scientists to build the space elevator.

It's not really an either/or situation

hah! That's the word I was looking for.

Since they want to "map the physical world", Google should buy the Euclideon guys already (Unlimited Detail Engine, Geoverse, etc):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Irf-HJ4fBls

And then release it for VR applications/games (one can hope).

I thought they were investment-scamming techno-cons who had never been releasing video demonstrations for years without ever releasing a product.

The technology is amazing, but honestly these applications don't really seem that valuable, especially to the average user. Facial recognition is the main application of machine vision I can think of, but even that has limited utility. And I'm not sure if it will actually benefit from this technology.

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