I was seated in the front of the lead raft. Pole position meant taking a
dunk through the rapids, but it also put me next to Luc Vincent, the
expedition’s leader. Vincent is the man responsible for all the imagery
in Google’s online maps. He’s in charge of everything from choosing
satellite pictures to deploying Google’s planes around the world to
sending its camera-equipped cars down every road to even this, a float
through the Grand Canyon. The raft trip was a mapping expedition that
was also serving as a celebration: Google Maps had just introduced a
major redesign, and the outing was a way of rewarding some of the team’s
members.
Vincent wore a black T-shirt with the eagle-globe-and-anchor insignia of
the United States Marine Corps on his chest and the slogan “Pain is
weakness leaving the body” across his back. Though short in stature, he
has the upper-body strength of an avid rock climber. He chose to get his
Ph.D. in computer vision, he told me, because the lab happened to be
close to Fontainebleau — the famous climbing spot in France. While
completing his postdoc at the Harvard Robotics Lab, he led a successful
expedition up Denali, the highest peak in North America.
A Frenchman who has lived half his 49 years in the United States,
Vincent was never in the Marines. But he is a leader in a new great
game: the Internet land grab, which can be reduced to three key battles
over three key conceptual territories. What came first, conquered by Google’s superior search algorithms. Who was next, and Facebook was the victor. But where, arguably the biggest prize of all, has yet to be completely won.
Where-type questions — the kind that result in a little map popping up
on the search-results page — account for some 20 percent of all Google
queries done from the desktop. But ultimately more important by far is
location-awareness, the sort of geographical information that our phones
and other mobile devices already require in order to function. In the
future, such location-awareness will be built into more than just
phones. All of our stuff will know where it is — and that awareness will
imbue the real world with some of the power of the virtual. Your house
keys will tell you that they’re still on your desk at work. Your tools
will remind you that they were lent to a friend. And your car will be
able to drive itself on an errand to retrieve both your keys and your
tools.
While no one can say exactly how we will get from the current moment to
that Jetsonian future, one thing for sure can be said about
location-awareness: maps are required. Tomorrow’s map, integrally
connected to everything that moves (the keys, the tools, the car), will
be so fundamental to their operation that the map will, in effect, be
their operating system. A map is to location-awareness as Windows is to a
P.C. And as the history of Microsoft makes clear, a company that
controls the operating system controls just about everything. So the
competition to make the best maps, the thinking goes, is more than a
struggle over who dominates the trillion-dollar smartphone market; it’s a
contest over the future itself.
Google was relatively late to this territory. Its map was only a few
months old when it was featured at Tim O’Reilly’s inaugural Where 2.0
conference in 2005. O’Reilly is a publisher and a well-known visionary
in Silicon Valley who is convinced that the Internet is evolving into a
single vast, shared computer, one of whose most important individual
functions, or subroutines, is location-awareness.
Google’s original map was rudimentary, essentially a digitized road
atlas. Like the maps from Microsoft and Yahoo, it used licensed data,
and areas outside the United States and Europe were represented as blue
emptiness. Google’s innovation was the web interface: its map was
dragable, zoomable, panable.
These new capabilities were among the first implementations of a
technology that turned what had been a static medium — a web of pages —
into a dynamic one. MapQuest and similar sites showed you maps; Google
let you interact with them. Developers soon realized that they could
take advantage of that dynamism to hack Google’s map, add their own data
and create their very own location-based services.
A computer scientist named Paul Rademacher did just that when he
invented a technique to facilitate apartment-hunting in San Francisco.
Frustrated by the limited, bare-bones nature of Craigslist’s classified
ads and inspired by Google’s interactive quality, Rademacher spent six
weeks overlaying Google’s map with apartment listings from Craigslist.
The result,
HousingMaps.com, was one of the web’s first mash-ups.
Google never imagined that its service, which it called Maps, could be
co-opted like that: its product was designed to be a Google brand
extension, not a database that outside developers could use without
permission. “We were faced with a choice,” Mano Marks, one of the
engineers responsible for early versions of Google Maps, recalls in a
conversation with Rademacher that Google has put on YouTube. “We could
either sue him or hire him.” To Google’s credit, Rademacher was hired.
Rademacher’s mash-up showed Google that the map could be more than just
something that people glance at to keep from getting lost. By opening up
its map to everyone, Google could perhaps make itself into the one
indispensable cog in the giant collaborative computer that was emerging.
“HousingMaps was when people realized that making [map] data available
to other programmers was incredibly powerful,” O’Reilly says. “Google
never looked back.”
Rademacher helped Google develop and publish what’s known as an
application programming interface for Google Maps. Think of an A.P.I. as
a programmers-only side entrance into the Google mapmaking machine. No
longer did they have to repeat Rademacher’s hack; instead, with access
to the A.P.I., developers could combine Google’s free map with their own
data and end up with a cool mash-up like HousingMaps — or build an
entire company based on Google Maps. The real estate site Redfin, for
example, is basically just that: pictures of and information about
houses for sale layered over a map from Google. The same goes for
AirBnB, but with room rentals. Uber and Lyft, the quasi-taxi services.
RelayRides. TaskRabbit. NeighborGoods. They may not be household names
(yet), but there’s an entire Google Maps-based ecosystem out there.
Behind Vincent and me, near the center of the raft and
mounted about 10 feet above the surface of the river, was our
expedition’s payload: a green orb, about the size of a soccer ball and
dimpled with 15 lenses pointing in different directions. This
custom-made panoramic camera is what has made Google’s Street View
possible. Street View is the feature within Google Maps that allows you
to pull up a panoramic photograph taken from a particular spot on a
given street. For years now, cars with roof-mounted panoramic cameras
have been driving the world’s roads while taking pictures every yard or
so.
There is a version of the car-mounted Street View camera that is
designed to be worn like a backpack — that’s the Trekker. For the
raft-trip, the Trekker camera-orb was programmed to snap its 15
(virtual) shutters every few seconds. These pictures would be stored in
the camera’s computers; tagged with precise coordinates of latitude,
longitude and altitude; and then later digitally melded into one
360-degree image. Once the pictures collected on the raft trip are
incorporated into Google’s world map, anyone with an Internet connection
will be able to access an immersive virtual-reality view from anywhere
along the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
As a light rain started to fall, I wondered aloud if on this trip we had
already taken more photos from the bottom of the canyon than all the
previous trips combined. Maybe around 20,000 people in a given year run
the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, and it’s the sort of trip
that was all but unheard-of before the 1960s.
Vincent performed a quick calculation of our trip so far without a
calculator or even pencil and paper: two cameras on two rafts, each
taking 15 shots every two seconds, for three eight-hour days, versus
20,000 people a year taking snapshots for 50 years.
“Not yet,” he said. “By the end of the trip, I would think so — possibly.”
As we talked, lightning struck behind us, then to one side, then to the
other. The orb and its associated computers and copper cables were all
lashed to an aluminum mast, forming a conductive path reaching down to
the several inches of water sloshing in the bottom of the raft. The
consensus was that the Street View camera would make a decent lightning
rod. Word was passed to the boss.
“That’s why we brought two,” Vincent said, shrugging.
One perk of being a Google engineer is being encouraged
to devote 20 percent of your time to your own project. Back in 2004,
Street View was Vincent’s. The idea was to photograph every inch of
every street in San Francisco and put those pictures inside the map. It
was a big job, and Vincent had a lot of people at Google pitching in to
help. (Larry Page, one of the company’s founders, was a trailblazer; in
2001, he collected images by driving around town with a video camera
mounted to the side of his car.) Eventually, Street View would become
the next breakthrough for Google Maps after the introduction of its
programming interface. But Google was not the first company to turn this
idea into reality; Amazon was.
In 2005,
A9.com, Amazon’s skunk
works for search technology, unveiled an innovative feature called Block
View. It was meant to be a newfangled Yellow Pages where you could find
the phone number and address of a local business — as well as a
photograph of its storefront. Block View was discontinued after only 20
months, but not before Microsoft introduced its own version, Streetside,
that was essentially identical, except that Microsoft’s pictures of
streets and storefronts were seen through a digitally created framing
device. Though the photos were taken from car-roof-mounted cameras, they
were presented online as if you were looking through a windshield. The
result was dorky, but it was one solution to the vexing problem of
coming up with a user interface. How do you move through a map made of
photographs? Microsoft’s answer: In a virtual car.
Google ultimately developed a more elegant user interface. Instead of
representing movement along a street as flipping through a filmstriplike
series of photographs, as Block View and Streetside did, Google pursued
the idea of a panoramic camera — what would become the green orb — and
used it to take a panoramic photo every few feet. The effect of hopping
from one photo to the next in Street View is one of walking through
virtual space.
Microsoft’s Streetside debuted in 2006 with a photographic rendering of
parts of Seattle and San Francisco. Google’s Street View arrived a year
later, with five cities: San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami and
Denver. Google eventually overwhelmed Microsoft with a more aggressive
surveying program. Street View now covers 3,000 cities in 54 countries,
and it has gone beyond streets and onto train tracks, hiking trails,
even rivers. A section of the Amazon was the first river, appearing last
year; the Thames made its debut in October; and the Colorado will be
available by the end of the year. “We want to paint the world,” Vincent
says. When I asked him what level of resolution we were talking about,
he said, “About one pixel to the inch.”
By threading photograph after photograph along the
lines that mark the byways and highways on the map, Vincent and his team
are making, in effect, one large photograph of the globe. It’s a neat
trick, perhaps even the next conceptual leap for cartography, but like
most things Google spends a lot of money on, very likely to be more
useful than it first appears. Like most people when they first encounter
Street View, O’Reilly used it to check out the photo of his house. But
then, he says, he later began to see the potential of the data collected
by Google and to imagine more and more uses for it.
Street View turns out to be incredibly valuable for all sorts of things —
but above all for mapmaking. By 2008, Google was ready to wean itself
from the licensed data that underpinned the first generation of Google
Maps by greatly expanding its database of geographical information
instead, which was called Oyster. The team added terabytes worth of raw
data tagged to locations, everything they could get their hands on. In
the United States, some of the best information is free and comes from
the federal government: U.S. Geological Survey and Forest Service
reports, census records and the like. Google bought other map data
outright, from both the United States and abroad. But in most of the
developing world, there was simply no good map data to be had at any
price. In places like India, Oyster made do with only poor-quality
tracings of the streets taken from satellite photos.
Creating one big map from hundreds or even thousands of other maps means
comparing each map with all the others to see how they line up. They
never do. Including crucial details about address and turn-restriction
information — necessary for generating driving instructions — has
traditionally been a matter of sending cars out to drive the roads in
question and waiting for the drivers to file their reports, a process
called ground-truthing. Street View provided Google with a shortcut. Not
only were the GPS tracks from the Street View cars great for
reconciling map data, but the pictures taken by the panoramic camera
also made it possible to go into Street View and look around for
turn-restriction information. Google can ground-truth its data in
virtual space. In Hyderabad, India, Google has a staff of more than
2,000 ground-truthers “driving” through cyberspace every day,
cross-referencing map data with the Street View pictures.
In addition to the human operators, pattern-recognition bots search the
archive for addresses: Google’s computer-vision programs look for house
numbers, street signs, even the bespectacled face of Colonel Sanders —
in which case the bot will flag the corresponding point on the map with a
note that there’s probably a KFC franchise located there. “When we
started, Street View was just some sci-fi idea,” Vincent says, “but now,
it’s the backbone.”
The rainfall hitting the hot canyon walls produced a
vaporous mist that put the entire canyon into soft focus. Vincent called
back to the crew working the camera: “These panos, we must keep them. I
think they will be quite artistic.”
During a routine Street View mission, pictures spoiled by rain are
rejected. Street View drivers are instructed to drive only in the summer
months, when the sun is high, in order to keep the light relatively
consistent from region to region. If it rains, they have to pull over
and wait out the storm. But a raft trip is a different story. And
besides, Vincent was right: the scene before us was incredibly
beautiful. Everyone was wide-eyed. “I’m trying to burn these images into
my retinas, so I never forget this place,” I said.
“You never will,” Vincent said, “because Street View is there to help you to remember.”
It was a trippy moment, the realization that I was going to be able to
look back at my own outsourced memory one day. It brought to mind the
writer Jorge Luis Borges. In a short story entitled “On Exactitude in
Science,” Borges tells of a long-ago empire where “the Art of
Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province
occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety
of a Province.” In Borges’s empire, the importance of the cartographic
guild grew as the map grew, until finally the empire was completely
covered by a map of itself.
After the downpour faded, I suggested to Vincent that there was
something Borgesian about this project of his. This raft trip was
effectively sucking the Grand Canyon into Google’s vast cartographic
oyster — indeed, his green orbs were capturing the entire world. “What
happens,” I asked, “when Street View grows to be as big as the territory
it covers?”
Vincent answered with a question of his own: “How many photos would you
need if you wanted one picture taken every 10 meters across the earth’s
surface?”
“Um, a googol?” A wild guess.
“The answer is easy once you know how much land there is in the world.”
I didn’t, so I had no idea how many individual panoramic photos you
would need to get the entire planet inside Street View.
“Well over a trillion,” he said, “and we are nowhere close.”
Vincent went on to point out that the two largest and most populous
continents have barely been touched by Street View. “Africa and much of
Asia are big holes right now.” And Street View clones are popping up in
all the places where Google is not active. “There are three in China,
two in Russia, one in Turkey, another in Korea and many others as well.”
Vincent doesn’t worry much about competitors like Microsoft, but he
takes the clones seriously. “They all have copied our user interface
beautifully,” he said, “It’s a form of flattery.” He laughed, but it was
clear that he regarded such copycat behavior as a form of theft. “We
are behind in those places,” he added.
Vincent’s Street View cars have already mapped six
million miles. Depending on your perspective, that’s either a quite a
lot (equivalent to 12 trips to the moon and back) or not much at all
(only one-tenth of the world’s estimated 60 million miles of road).
Either way, Google’s huge investment in the camera-equipped cars — not
to mention trikes, boats, snowmobiles and, yes, rafts — has yielded the
most detailed street atlas on earth.
Early last year, Google’s United States market share for where-type
queries topped 70 percent, and Google started to get serious about
recouping the fortune it has been sinking into making its map, putting a
tollbooth in front of its application programming interface.
Henceforth, heavy users would be charged for the privilege. (The very
biggest users — which Google wouldn’t identify — were already paying.)
The use limit was carefully calibrated: it would start at 25,000
map-related requests a day for 90 consecutive days. More than 99 percent
of the users of the A.P.I. — small, boutique sites like HousingMaps.com
— would be under the limit and thus unaffected. Even so, that left
approximately 3,500 sites, companies that actually have a real business
dependent on Google’s maps, which would have to pay. The change prompted
an exodus.
Foursquare, an urban-exploration app used by 6 percent of smartphone
users worldwide, was one of the first big players to leave last winter.
Additional high-profile defections followed in the spring: Wikipedia
left on what could probably be described as ideological grounds; it
simply doesn’t like the idea of proprietary data. Craigslist wanted more
control. Apple defected in the summer. Its motive was strategic, even
paranoid. The arrival of the tollbooth made it clear that Google saw
Maps as a crucial part of an operating system for mobile devices. Could
this lead to its having too much power over the
iPhone itself?
Those four companies all turned to the same alternative: OpenStreetMap, a
nonprofit based in Britain often described as the Wikipedia of mapping.
Founded 10 years ago by Steve Coast, a cartography-obsessed
computer-science student at University College London who liked to
bicycle around town with a GPS taped to his handlebars and a laptop
recording its data in his backpack, O.S.M. has since grown into a
collaboration among some 300,000 map enthusiasts around the world. The
resulting map is one that anyone can contribute to and use, free of
charge. But it wasn’t until Google Maps started locking down its data
that O.S.M. became what it is now — a potential challenger to Google’s
cartographic hegemony.
On the last day of my ride-along, Vincent beached the
rafts in order to take the two orbs up to the site of a prehistoric
Indian ruin. He and a colleague, Daniel Filip, unstrapped the Trekkers
from their masts and restrapped them onto their backs. Each pack weighed
40 pounds; the orbs, fixed at the end of a mechanical stalk, hovered at
just above head height. Together the two men started zigzagging up the
North Rim, a pair of eyeballs going to see what was at the top of the
trail.
Filip is the most senior engineer on the Street View team. He was the
one who came up with the idea of using the 360-degree panoramic camera
in Street View, and he built the software engine that allows you to
navigate from one panorama to the other. At one point Filip managed to
become separated from the group. He didn’t see anything funny about
someone on a mapmaking expedition taking a wrong turn. “The trail is
just not very well marked, is all,” he said.
The vista down the Colorado River from the Indian ruin is the same view
that appears on the back of Arizona’s 2010 commemorative quarter, and
after Filip arrived, Vincent handed him his phone and, his orb still
overhead, posed for a portrait. Crouching down for a better camera
angle, Filip suddenly lost his balance. The orb puts the wearer’s center
of gravity high on the body. For a long moment, Filip teetered. The
trail was a mere shelf in the steeply sloping cliff-face, scarcely two
feet wide, 700 feet above the canyon’s bottom. His foot slipped, sending
a shower of gravel over the side. His arms pinwheeled. It was the
closest of close calls.
For a long while afterward, Filip told me, he couldn’t stop thinking
about his son and the long-overdue appointment with his estate lawyer.
There are still dangers associated with mapping the world.
Today, Google’s map includes the streets of every
nation on earth, and Street View has so far collected imagery in a
quarter of those countries. The total number of regular users: A billion
people, or about half of the Internet-connected population worldwide.
Google Maps underlies a million different websites, making its map
A.P.I. among the most-used such interfaces on the Internet. At this
point Google Maps is essentially what Tim O’Reilly predicted the map
would become: part of the information infrastructure, a resource more
complete and in many respects more accurate than what governments have.
It’s better than MapQuest’s map, better than Microsoft’s, better than
Apple’s.
“You don’t see anybody competing with Google on the level or quantity of
their mapping today,” says Coast, who now works as a
geographic-information professional. But, he adds, “that’s because it’s
not entirely rational to build a map like Google has.” Google does not
say how much it spends on its satellite imagery, its planes, its
camera-equipped cars, but clearly it’s an enormous sum. O.S.M., by
contrast, runs on less than $100,000 a year. Google’s spending is
“unsustainable,” Coast argues, “because in the long run, this stuff is
all going to be free.”
The O.S.M. map data is free now — but using it comes with a catch. Any
improvement, or any change at all, that a developer makes to O.S.M.’s
map must be sent back to O.S.M. It’s a clever tactic, forcing
competitors of Google Maps to choose between fighting Google alone or
joining a coalition that, if it prevails, will ensure that no private
company will ever be able to establish a mapping monopoly.
So far Coast’s coalition is doing pretty well. In some places, he says,
O.S.M. has grown to be even more information-dense than Google Maps — in
North Korea, for example, but also parts of Europe. One limitation,
though, is the questionable utility of some of the details. The cities
that O.S.M. has mapped are sometimes charted down to every footpath,
bench and tree, yet they can still lack accurate particulars about
addresses and traffic rules. It turns out that for the unpaid map nerds
who make up the bulk of O.S.M.’s volunteer staff, Coast says, “entering
turn restrictions is just not as fun as entering trails.”
For-profit companies have started contributing data and in some cases
even money to the O.S.M. cause. Microsoft was an early supporter,
opening up its A.P.I. and giving access to aerial imagery that Coast
values at “approximately priceless.” One of the smaller in-car GPS
companies, Telenav, where Coast is currently employed, has lately
provided turn-restriction data and hired professional mappers to work
with O.S.M.’s cadre of amateurs. Foursquare, whose map uses data from
O.S.M., has a map-correction app that potentially adds its 40 million
users to the O.S.M. coalition.
Coast is confident that, given time, Google’s map will be surpassed by
the O.S.M. map: “You don’t see any proprietary competitors to Wikipedia,
right?”
O’Reilly is more skeptical. “An open-hardware play broke the IBM
monopoly, an open-software play broke the Microsoft monopoly, and
eventually an open-data play will prevail,” O’Reilly admits, but he
points out that those earlier cases were not instances of direct
competition between rival companies. “It wasn’t a plug-compatible
mainframe clone that dethroned IBM; it wasn’t a free operating system
like Linux that dethroned Windows.” Rather, he says, “it was this toy,
the personal computer, it was the global operating system that we call
the Internet.”
Google, for its part, is committed to its strategy of having the best
map, whatever the cost. Brian McClendon, a vice president who oversees
all of Google’s Geo products, disputes even the idea that the
free-spending map division is a money loser. Because 20 percent of
Google searches produce where-type results, he argues that his team
should be credited with a commensurate portion of search revenues.
Revenue from ads on local where-type searches, McClendon says, are
“already valuable enough to justify the investment — plus, plus.”
In June, Google bought the popular social-mapping app Waze for close to a
billion dollars. The product can be thought of as a Twitter for traffic
jams, and the acquisition was widely interpreted as a defensive move — a
way of keeping valuable map data out of competitors’ hands. Then in the
summer, Google released a new Maps interface, code-named Tactile. The
redesign, which Google officially refers to as “the new Google Maps,” is
currently accessible in preview mode (and is expected to replace and
take the name of Google Maps sometime in the next couple of months).
Zoom in on more than a hundred cities around the world and see not
simply a photograph of the rooftops, but also the buildings themselves
rendered in 3-D and viewable from any angle. Zoom even lower, switch to
Street View and you can enter public buildings. Pull back to the
stratosphere, and clouds can be seen encircling the earth, rendered from
real-time weather data. Pull back even further, and there is the big
blue marble at the edge of the Milky Way, our planet rolling like a
trackball under your fingertips.
The new interface is as significant as any change to Google’s mapping
products since Maps debuted nine years ago and one that makes Apple’s
rejection of Google Maps seem like an understandable business decision.
Tactile is beautiful and graceful and poised to dominate its world —
Apple-like, inother words.
In most tellings, Apple was the big loser in its 2012 clash with Google
over maps. The public outcry over the many shortcomings of Apple’s Maps —
mismarked hospital emergency rooms, whole towns gone missing, twisted
and disfigured aerial imagery — prompted a public apology from Apple’s
new chief executive, Tim Cook. The Apple executive responsible for
mobile software, Scott Forstall, was dismissed. Possibly the most
lasting damage was the blemish the episode left on Apple’s reputation:
Where was the company’s reliably elegant design?
At the same time, Google seemed to be blindsided by Apple’s move. Google
Maps had been the default map on the iPhone — part of the operating
system, not simply an app — but when Apple issued iOS6, its upgrade to
the iPhone’s operating system, Google’s map was suddenly replaced with
Apple’s homegrown version. Overnight, Google Maps lost 300 million iOS
users — approximately 20 percent of the global smartphone market — to
Apple, not to mention the data that those iPhone users had been
generating for Google. Such data is precious. It can be used to refine
the map. It could also be mined for hidden correlations and moneymaking
opportunities. It’s possible to imagine an analysis of where, when and
how long people shop at some stores compared with others or getting an
answer to the question: How many potential customers who are headed to
one particular store end up in the competitor’s store across the street?
What’s more, the data from iPhones is particularly valuable, because it
comes from people who are known to pay a premium for technology and
convenience.
What really made the experience sting, though, was that Google had no
contingency plan. After Apple’s surprise switch, iPhone customers were
clamoring to dump its product and return to Google Maps, but Google had
no external Maps app ready for the iPhone. It took the company three
months to make one. Google should have been prepared for this
possibility: it had been no secret that Apple was up to something. The
first iPhone debuted in 2007 with Google Maps built in, but since then,
Apple has been buying up promising little mapping-technology companies.
Industry data should have prompted suspicions: “We keep a database of
all online job postings,” O’Reilly says, “and I remember seeing a huge
spike in Apple hiring developers with mapping expertise.”
The blows suffered by Google and Apple were seen as opportunities by the
other two players still left in the game: Microsoft and OpenStreetMap.
Microsoft knows better than most that a monopolistic position in the
technology sector is not unassailable. It has itself toppled giants like
IBM and seen its own operating system’s dominance unwound by the
Internet.
No one knows what the next new thing will be, but it’s very likely that there will
be one, some technological innovation or legal event that shakes up the
Internet again. Microsoft is hedging its bets, in case privacy concerns
lead to changes in consumer behavior or regulations that upend the
communications-technology industry: it asks users to opt in before it
collects GPS traces from mobile phones in order to incorporate that data
into its maps. Its many businesses — Windows, Office, Xbox, video
games, consulting services, mobile phones and advertising — offer
potential hedges against unpredictability as well. Google, on the other
hand, depends on a single extremely profitable business — selling
advertising — to subsidize the rest of its enterprises. Microsoft is
betting that its diversified, conservative approach will enable the
company to endure and prosper should Google be brought low.
OpenStreetMap, by contrast, is rushing headlong into Google’s territory.
Steve Coast recently showed me the latest innovation: iPhone
attachments that look a bit like kazoos or doll-size French horns, made
of plastic. “They’re snap-on panoramic lenses,” he said. Coast intends
to release an app soon that will enable anyone’s cellphone to function
as an open-source version of the Google orb. The resolution of the
panoramas it will produce will be nowhere near orb-quality, Coasts
conceded, but he claimed that the metric that really matters is the
price-quality ratio. “For $60 anyone can have their own Street View
vehicle!” He did add, sotto voce, that “the real barrier to entry is
that you have to be willing to duct-tape your phone to the top of your
car.”
Coast has a related plan for adding more and better aerial imagery to
OpenStreetMap: it turns out to be relatively simple for a computer
program to transform snapshots taken from a small plane into what look
like extremely high-resolution satellite photos. And sometime this
month, Planet Labs, a new space-imaging start-up, plans to launch the
world’s largest privately owned network of earth-imaging satellites and
make all the pictures they take publicly and freely available.
Borges’s story ends with the map of the empire becoming so big that it
achieves a scale of one to one, at which point it — along with
cartography itself — fades into irrelevance. “In the deserts of the
West, still today,” Borges writes in his last line, “there are tattered
ruins of that map, inhabited by animals and beggars.”
We’re fast approaching an endgame in which the capacity to read a map
could become a lost art. The online-map era started with a flowering:
Rademacher’s HousingMaps.com. Foursquare and others took the concept to
its logical conclusion. It’s no exaggeration to describe the smartphone
as the equivalent of a cursor moving through a one-to-one-scale map of
the world. Today, turn-by-turn navigation is the quintessential map app.
Already some maps exist as voices that tell you where to go: Turn left, turn right. When cars drive themselves, the map will have been fully absorbed into the machine.
Right now Google has about 25 experimental self-driving cars on public
roads in California and Nevada. So far they have driven more than
600,000 miles without being involved in a serious accident. The
self-driving algorithms do not work because there has been some
breakthrough in artificial intelligence; they run on maps. Every road
that Google’s robo-cars drive on was first surveyed by a human-driven
pilot car outfitted with sensors accurate enough to measure the
thickness of the painted lines in the middle of the road. Every detail
of the road has been mapped beforehand. According to Peter Norvig,
Google’s head of research, it’s a hard problem for computer vision and
artificial intelligence to pick a traffic light out of a scene and
determine if it is red, yellow or green. But it is trivially easy to
recognize the color of a traffic light that you already know is there.
In effect, the robot car is not driving through the real world so much
as it is moving through, in Borges’s words, “a map of the Empire, whose
size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with
it.” When the real world is transformed into a data set, it starts to
take on some of the aspects of the virtual.
Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, has promised to release self-driving
technology within four years, and Google’s maps will then be a standard
feature in its robot cars. Not to be outdone, Elon Musk has promised
that Tesla Motors will deliver a self-driving car in three years. It’s
too early to know whether Tesla will use O.S.M.’s maps — but the
indications are that it will not use Google’s.
The map, at that point, will just be data: a way for our phones, cars
and who knows what else to navigate in the real world. Whose data will
that be: Google’s? Ours? Our car company’s? It’s too soon to tell. But
one thing seems certain, O’Reilly says. In the end, “the guy who has the
most data, wins.”
Adam Fisher lives in San Francisco and has written for Wired, Popular Science, Outside and other publications.
Editor:
Dean Robinson
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 12, 2013
An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a competitor to Google Maps. It is OpenStreetMap, not OpenStreetMaps.
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