With a lot of smart phones now provisioned with capable Google Maps navigation and directions, handheld GPS devices need to continue to innovate in order to stay relevant. A dedicated GPS device still makes a lot of sense for outdoor recreation off the beaten path and away from cell phone networks that can serve up other navigation services.

Yesterday’s announcement that Garmin has invested in Intermap’s detailed 3D digital mapping data, makes good sense. This high-resolution data far exceeds the quality and detail for 3D terrain, a critical element for back-country navigation. We’re seeing a similar approach from DeLorme with their recent addition of the SPOT emergency locator to communicate with text messages via satellite in areas where there is no cell phone signal. These moves continue to make these devices relevant to the outdoor enthusiast, who are the primary market for these devices into the future.

Cost of entry into Mobile Mapping work is a considerable expense according to Lewis Graham of GeoCue from the ASPRS Hot Topics Session at ILMF 10 in Denver.

• $750 to 900K for the mapping system
• Vehicle $50K
• Production hardware $150K
• Production software $125K (can share some hardware and software if you already have airborne)

Personnel costs include the need for a driver, equipment operator and surveyor on the collection side. On the office side there’s a need for a production manager, geometric correction specialist, and at least two data collection technicians.

Mobile mapping has hit its commercial stride in 2009. As many as 10 different systems were sold last year even in a down economy.

Software is lagging now to exploit the data, but more software and solutions will emerge to speed up the data processing and visualizations of the final product.

I love the idea of Obscura Day, a day of expeditions, back-room tours and hidden treasures in your own home town. The event planned for March 20, 2010 is organized by Atlas Obscura, a website that aims to compile the world’s wonders, curiosities and esoterica. The event serves as both a promotion of the site and as a means to compile more locations into this Atlas of curious places as they’re actively recruiting new sites and cities.

There are worldwide events scheduled here that range from the behind-the-scenes museum wonders, to interesting tours of large machinery such as one of the largest pneumatic tube system at the Stanford University Hospital (4 miles of tubes), to a gold-plated home outside of Chicago, to the 3D Center of Art and Photography in Portland, Oregon. The site organizes participation in these events as many of them may fill up on this date. There’s no charge from the organizers, but some venues may have an admission price.

I scrolled through more than a dozen events and locations and found that I’d love to explore each of these places, and will be sure to check out the Atlas Obscura site prior to travels in new cities. I’ll be in Florida at the end of the month, and in a bit of the Everglades, so I may just have to check out the streets of Unit 11 in West Palm Beach that were laid out as a subdivision more than 40 years ago and that are now reclaimed by nature. Sounds like a movie set for an apocalyptic future that would be fascinating to see first hand. And judging from the rest of the list, these site are designed to offer an alternative take on what we know as reality.

Discovered via Twitter from a post by @reidab.

Given the state of the economy, any announcement of jobs provides reason for celebration. Today’s front page of the Denver Post was jubilant about the U.S. Air Force six-year contract with Raytheon Co. for GPS-related work worth $886.5 million that is set to bring more than 300 high-paying jobs to Colorado. The contract is to modernize the ground control segment of the Next Generation GPS Control Segment (OCX).

The algorithms behind the functionality of Microsoft’s Photosynth offering began as Noah Snavely’s Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Washington. Snavely is now a computer scientist at Cornell University, and he’s working to push the scale of montaging 2D photos to create 3D realities beyond current limitations of dozens or hundreds of photos toward tens of thousands and even millions of photos.

The project dubbed PhotoCity is discussed in detail in a feature in today’s New York Times. A novel approach to this new effort to create large 3D models is that the capability is being built around a social game scenario that will spur competing teams to add and improve images where there is little coverage. Users will be able to use their iPhones to upload collections of digital images.

This harnessing of collaborative approaches seems to be the next map paradigm shift, witnessed recently in the swift OpenStreetMap mapping of Haiti. This next move toward the creation of richly detailed 3D realities as crowd-sourced efforts cuts out the data provider role, and the simpler collection methods that are accessible to all have some serious repercussions for commercial data collectors.

View the gameplay tutorial via YouTube in the video below.

Earthmine was one of the more interesting exhibitors at last year’s SPAR Conference in Denver. I visited with the company last year and ran into the company founder Anthony Fassero at this year’s event. They didn’t have a visible presence this year because Fassero indicated that they’re just too busy.

They have 10 vehicles now in rotation collecting data worldwide, and Fassero said that they’re busy on a major data collection project in France. The big push is for pixel-based collection of urban environments, with each pixel having an accuracy of less than one meter.

I ran into a Twitter post by Tim O’Reilly that pointed me to this blog post with the following embedded video that shows a very exciting view of future pedestrian navigation (including x-ray vision) that uses Earthmine data for visual search along with mobile video as the sensor. This amazing augmented reality application uses Earthmine’s photo point clouds to solve the major problem of data collection.

Earthmine has expanded their business model to include hosting their own data in the cloud, and providing developer tools so that other companies can create interesting applications. The above example was developed by a company named Occipital using Earthmine data and their development tools.

It’s great to see this exciting use of Earthmine data, and to speculate about future applications that this quality data enables. The utility of the photo point cloud starts to make great sense, particularly in the mobile environment, because there are far fewer points than LIDAR for a more compressed data set. The full 3D view is captured with good textures and realism to neatly represent the world around you.

I can’t wait to hear more about what the company has been up to. Fassero indicated that they’re staying rather quiet right now, but that we’ll hear more from them in the June time frame with a France-oriented announcement.

NAVTEQ has just released new 3D city models for Europe. The new map products add textures and colors to cityscapes, and emphasize flexibility in how the data can be used by developers.

This new product is extremely flexible, enabling navigable 3D animation to be generated in real-time. For example, buildings in the foreground can be made transparent, while leaving texture detail only on the corner of the next manoeuvre.  It provides system developers with a wide range of customisation options on functions such as texture and camera perspective which can be used to create differentiation between products and brands.

The competition for developers and users of rich navigation experiences means that the quality of map data for navigation and point of interest are ever increasing. This developer-centric focus points to the limits of data providers to control the experience themselves as they rely on device and application developers to make the most of the raw products that they provide. We can expect more realism, and more variety in data products as these markets continue to mature.

Microsoft announced a new feature to Bing Maps yesterday at the TED conference. Streetside Photos allows the users to see an image from a photo sharing site such as Flickr instead of the standard photo, and even includes historical photos in order to see how an area once looked. The feature that allows you to see photos in their full context is available in Seattle, San Francisco and Vancouver now, but there are plans to roll it out in additional cities.

This new functionality is being touted as augmented reality by some, because it allows you to quickly stitch one photo onto existing photos and has an accuracy of just a few inches. It even has the capacity to stitch a moving video on top of a map to create a lense-like effect.

“What we’ve really focused on in Bing Maps is making a continuum of experience that goes all the way from overview that’s  more like a classic atlas or map down to an oblique view so that you can get an angle that is closer to the human experience, and you can pan around in more of a SimCity type of view. All the way down to the human scale where the map is effectively as big as reality itself, where it is meant to be experienced as you would walking, biking or driving.”

– Blaise Aguera y Arcas, architect, Bing Maps

View the following video to get a better sense of what Microsoft has planned to add augmented reality to their mapping interface.

Following is an interesting talk by David Sivers at the TED Conference that uses several different map-based labeling and addressing assumptions to help us realize that people view the world in different ways. This is a good reminder that “there’s a flip side to everything,” and that we shouldn’t get too caught up in burning our own map-based assumptions into other people’s brains by proliferating static maps. There are many ways to look at the world.

I was excited to see the new Destination Maps from Bing that allow you to create custom simplified driving directions to your destination with your choice of look. The sketch-like maps strip out levels of detail in order to ease navigation by limiting the number of roads and features that are presented on the map.

When I first saw these, it seemed that I’d seen them before. A quick look back in my Blog archives uncovered this post about a MacArthur genius grant given to Maneesh Agrawala for his work, including his concept of LineDrive. Destination Maps is the latest iteration of Agrawala’s idea that was sold to Microsoft back in 2001. It’s great to see this functionality re-purposed here for the general public as it’s an important contribution and reminder that often simpler is better, particularly with routes in complex urban areas.

You need to download the latest version of Silverlight in order for this to work.