Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [111]
And in the age of GPS- and camera-enabled phones, you don’t need the helmet anymore. Imagine this: you walk out of a Manhattan office building and wonder where the closest subway is. Instead of consulting a bird’s-eye map, you just hold up your cell phone. The screen shows your current point of view but augments it with a new layer of information: as you rotate the phone, symbols appear, hovering in the air in front of you as if fixed in place. There’s one for the Lexington Avenue Line, just 325 feet to your right. Maybe a dotted pink trail appears on the sidewalk to guide you directly to the nearest entrance, and you have to look twice to be sure the trail’s not there in real life. On the way, you notice that user reviews are fading into view when you point your phone at restaurants, and sightseeing links accompany tourist attractions. When you angle the camera upward, the windows of some of the apartments across the street have virtual FOR RENT signs with prices listed. This is all information you could glean from any number of digital maps, but there’s a crucial difference: for thousands of years, we mentally projected ourselves into maps; now map information has the ability to project itself outward, onto us.
I’m so accustomed to the endless disappointments of futurism (in a year that begins with a 2, why am I not living in a domed undersea city by now?) that it comes as a shock when I read that augmented-reality phone apps already exist—not in labs and at trade shows but for reals: free in Apple’s app store, even. I upgrade to a new iPhone just to try out some of these tools but wind up disappointed. One called Wikitude promises to embed my environment with information about nearby POIs, like a Web browser for the real world, but when I try it out in front of my house, all I see are logos for every Starbucks and Best Buy within five miles. Yelp’s augmented-reality Monocle, the first AR app available for the iPhone, is a little better, bringing up an accurate text box about my favorite Thai place when I hold the phone up vertically and point it northwest, but neither program provides a very compelling experience. My version of the Apple operating system doesn’t allow third parties to use incoming visual information, so these apps are trying to figure out what I’m looking at based solely on readings from the camera’s GPS device and accelerometer. Even if I make slow, smooth phone movements, the AR data wiggles and jerks around unpredictably, destroying any illusion that it’s painted over the real world. And a smart-phone screen is just too small and dim to be very immersive. You end up squinting and thinking for a minute and then saying, “Yeah, I guess that’s kind of cool,” sort of like when you were looking at those Magic Eye posters of dolphins back in the 1990s.
But these are temporary glitches; before long, no doubt, the imagery will be smoother and we’ll all be wearing Terminator contact lenses with built-in heads-up displays for all the AR data. Not all the applications of augmented reality are map-related, of course. You could use it to interact with elaborate 3-D models that aren’t really there, which would be a boon to architects visualizing buildings and surgeons trying to practice a tricky triple bypass without killing anyone. If you were so inclined, you could even use AR to turn the world into your own surreal wonderland, changing the color of the sky every thirty seconds or putting a werewolf mask or Groucho glasses on the face of every passerby, like a Merry Pranksters app for an audience of one. But most day-to-day uses of the technology will probably be locational, and that makes me wonder: can this kind of in-world navigation even be called a map? It is a pictorial way to represent geography, I suppose, but one without any significant abstraction: the map is nothing but the territory itself with very good footnotes, a 3-D version of the Sylvie and Bruno map.
I don’t think that