Google held its curious little Maps event today (and WWDC is right around the corner, surely a coincidence, is it not?), showing off some new stuff in maps. While digital maps are one big snore to me (old maps fascinate me to no end, though), they did have one cool thing to show off: full 3D mapping, which they’re adding to Google Earth, also for mobile devices. It’ll arrive over the coming weeks. The race is on: will Apple’s 3D map thing arrive before, or after “the coming weeks”?
The best feature for me of this update is:
Finally; took them long enough. Well, that pretty much retires one major remaining Nokia advantage… (though the data of Nokia Maps is still nicely more detailed in my area, includes even dirt or forest roads – useful on bike trips; I imagine that might be the case in many places outside of few core Google markets)
I think the level of information provided by 3d texture map, while cool looking, is an absolute mess in term of usability, because they don’t provide extra information ( compared to stylized 3d model, or street view), Even for navigation, there is little chance that you would use this view in normal life ( except if we have our flying cars earlier than expected ).
I would say that Google (map division) is afraid of Apple, meaning it would be half baked.
The worst is that standard multi-touch controls do not properly handle 3D rotations. They only deal well with zooming and rotations along an axis that is perpendicular to the screen.
So either this feature will be relatively useless, as users cannot really benefit from the extra depth, or software engineers will try to use nonstandard gestures (e.g. three-finger swipes) to handle 3D rotations and it might turn out to be a usability disaster instead (“Oh, great, I don’t know how I did that, now how can I go back to a top view ?”)
I’m not optimistic.
Edited 2012-06-07 14:21 UTC
There’s always accelerometer / gyroscope, with which you can “look around” using the phone as a visor of sorts; like already in streetview.
Perhaps could map also to 3D map rotations.
I’m not sure that looking around would be very practical for a maps app. I don’t know how others use those, but myself I mainly need it while walking, sitting in a bus/train, or cycling, and in those situations waving my arm across wide angles definitely wouldn’t be a satisfactory option.
Maybe they could try something based on screen tilting, kind of like that gimmicky animation of the stock photo gallery app on Android, but on shiny LCD screens things can quickly become unreadable when you try that on a sunny day…
Edited 2012-06-08 12:18 UTC
Yeah that’s more or less what I mean – anyway, people don’t really wave their phone at arms length with streetview: the movements tend to be as minimal as possible; we are lazy creatures ;p
Now I also wonder if we’ll see “back touchpad” like in Sony Vita – two additional axis there could be handy in “more 3D” control situations (and isn’t that sort of the point behind Android’s open architecture & many handsets, to make experiments easier and possibly increase the pace of innovation?)
Edited 2012-06-14 00:05 UTC