One problem I see with the approach of simply drawing all the tracks on a map is that there are many sections, where you will have overlapping tracks. Most of the tracks are GPS tracks that are not snapped to a network and you end up with tracks on top of tracks on top of tracks. A spaghetti trail map. If the trails were modelled as a network, then it would be cool though if you could just click on a part of the track network and have suggested tours come up that pass the section of the network you just clicked on.

Who needs GPS to tell you how high up you are, when you have signs that tell you right on the spot.

Skitour trail data, including ski lifts and runs, as well as a gradient layer, that shows steep danger zones.

Der Experte für Outdoor und Touren

New Economy:

Der Experte für Outdoor und Touren

So it is quite interesting to see yet another approach to crowdsourced map-building. Waze, which labels itself as a “social mobile application” provides free of charge turn by turn navigation based on data that Wazers have already collected and are collecting right now. Starting from a blank map, the road network and Points of Interest are growing minute by minute as people contribute their traits and mappings. The Waze map emerges. I have yet to try this myself, but it must almost feel like the early days of the Open Street Map project. I am not sure about the initial idea and motivation behind Waze - but I enjoyed reading this bit on the Waze blog :  “In fact, in certain countries with no base map, users will literally be building maps from scratch - paving the roads entirely themselves, as they drive…”

To me that sounds like a call for wakening the explorer inside ourselves. And it works. I do feel like going out exploring today! Maybe not so much on the road - but wouldn’t it be great to waze the Great Outdoors? Map the trails you have walked, the walls you have climbed, the streams you have mastered and the slopes you have skied. Make it an exploration game - creating your personal Digital Earth. Your private universe.

Imagine, having your personal discovery map - a map that basically puts you back in time to give you a terra incognita experience, but customised for the 21st century. The map would just show the roads and tracks that you have already explored solely by yourself. Personal exploration by direct experience that is. No virtual exploration and discovery tools like Google Earth or Bing Maps allowed. In fact, these virtual globes should be banned since they take away all the fun of direct personal exploration if you can’t resist having a look. Statistics would provide your total life-kilometres, a spatio-temporal lifeline and your personal exploration road and track network. Boldly going where …. you have not been before.

• Das Handy wird zum Welt-Wissensfenster
• Mein Handy zeigt etwas was Du nicht siehst

Both articles are in German, but Google Translate results will get the core ideas across. The first article provides an overview of different use cases that can already be served by the technology. The author of the first article notes that what is still missing, is an application, which pulls things together to offer a one stop shop for augmented reality search, exploration and discovery. The second article looks at some applications like Mobeedo and Layar in more detail.

But it was a third article about the disruption in the Navigation Systems market that Google Maps Navigation and low-cost iPhone navigation apps like Skobbler have kicked off recently, which got me thinking about augmented reality in a different way - even though that third article does not actually cover augmented reality.

• Navi-Mammuts sind vom Aussterben bedroht

The authors argue that Google’s camera equipped Street View Cars are in fact Trojan horses, since capturing the images is just one aspect of the map data collection and processing that is actually happening behind the scenes and under the hood of the Google Street View cars. As the 360 virtual reality mapping mission progresses, each kilometre of geodata generates more information and less privacy. But how is this related to Augmented Reality?

Google continues to build the most impressive digital earth application out there - Google Earth. Thinking to the end, it may be difficult to distinguish the real view that you see when you are actually out there, exploring, from the the virtual reality view, generated by geodata. The next best thing to being there. So what is the difference between…

1. …pointing your iPhone or Android device around and looking at the augmented reality camera view that displays overlayed objects in reality and…
2. …virtually moving around a 360 virtual reality world, where additional information can also be overlaid?

Time. Obviously, Google’s virtual world cannot provide a real time view any time soon. Although first steps in that direction have been made by research groups, even Google consider it creepy and probably also a little bit too difficult - at least at the moment.

Screenshot taken from Google Geo Developers Blog

But if you don’t mind the time gap between now and when the images were taken, then Mapsicle, a cool new Street View library developed by New Zealand company ProjectX, will enable you to create and experience armchair augmented reality. Virtual tours that link up panoramic images and overlay information have been around for quite a while, especially in the real estate industry. But with Google Street View providing the ultimate roadtrip virtual tour and easy tools to overlay information and add links, like Mapsicle, things are taken to a new level. Mapsicle was even featured on the Google Lat Long blog and we may expect that there is more cool stuff ahead with this project. Why?

Because it is very cool to have a real world interface that complements the map as a way to search, explore and discover information as if being there. State of the art augmented reality apps enable you to check out what’s around your current position and put it in context of what you can see in a certain direction - soon we’ll find out what’s around the corner in the same photorealistic way - but without having to walk there if it is not worth it. We can virtually explore and use augmented virtual reality as an intuitive real world metaphor for search, exploration and discovery.

Together with a few other people, we got into a van and drove up the farm road. The driving seemed a bit pointless, since we got off just a few hundred meters up the hill - Anyway, our guide started to show us some fruit that grew next to road - Mango tress, Banana trees, Jackfruit and he provided a wealth of information about how, when and where they grow and what is special about them.

We continued walking around a bit and every few meters there was another species of fruit to be discovered and learned about. The guide explained everything in a really entertaining way and we very much enjoyed our outdoor fruit seminar.

“Any fresher, you have to squeeze it yourself”

Then we got to the feeding part. There was a huge fruit table - and straigt away, we knew that the next hour or so would simply be awesome. So we took a few pieces of fruit from each of the fruit plates, piled them up on our own plate, and then started digging into.

It is difficult to describe how good and healthy it feels munching fruits - many of them you have never even heard of before, let alone tasted them. And then, here it was - the second serendipitous discovery of the day - obviously a consequence of the first one - the fruit farm itself. I have never ever tasted anything like it before. Lúcama - or also called “eggfruit” - a more descriptive English name for what I reckon must be the most tasty fruit on this planet. I immediately found myself focusing fully on the eggfruit plate and after the plate was refilled for the third time, I started to feel a little bit guilty. I felt even more guilty after we asked about buying some of the eggfruit to take away and were told that they don’t actually sell them because there are only a few trees on the fruit farm - and that’s about the only place in Malaysia that you actually find the fruit at all. Still feeling guilty, I also thought that this is almost unbelievable - something that tastes so nice and you can’t really get it - at least not that easily as it seemed. Since I only managed to take a photograph of the nicely cut fruit, you might want to have a look at the whole fruit on the following site, which also provides eggfruit nutrition fact.

More details about the new world record at www.dooogy.com.