Anyone who reads this blog a lot knows that I sometimes romanticise about how far technology has come even just in my own little lifetime, especially with regards to the endless incredible marvel that is the Information Superhighway. Admittedly, a lot of the recent strides have been from companies like Google and Apple, and here’s another great example of exactly why it’s just really exciting for me to be living in a time like this!
I mean, sure – there are obvious questions like whether you actually want pop-ups springing forth into your field of vision at any random moment and please keep in mind that this is an extremely early prototype that the engineers at Google are playing around with, but it’s still pretty neat to see all of the social and location-based tie-ins that can be built into a device, whether it be a pair of glasses or even just your smart phone, to further enhance whatever else it is that you happen to be doing at the time. It’s kind of crazy for me to take a look at something like my iPhone – a device that I absolutely love and couldn’t imagine living without, even having only had it for a little over a year, and then seeing the next generation beyond that as we continue to build on the live maps and always-on mobile connectivity that we’re already enjoying today!
Now that said, there’s one other link that I wanted to share that’s equally cool, though I also just found out about this one pretty recently, too. Google Maps Street View – I always thought that it was kinda neat if you wanted to get an idea of the building that you’re looking for or maybe just to further stalk your ex, but I had no idea some of the very cool and different applications that they were now introducing to the technology. Like, you know, if you say wanted to take a virtual tour of the Amazon rainforest, just to name an example… 😉
Google is now using this 360 technology that they perfectly with the initial launch of street view to now offer tours of the White House, the Swiss Alps, Sea World Orlando, Hollywood Boulevard, and just all sorts of random landmark-type places will literally allow you to simulate walking down the street (or jungle path) as if you were actually there for yourself! And here I thought it was cool a few years ago when they loaded all of the data from the Mars rovers and the moon landing into Google Maps … well, that’s still very cool, but now so is this!
I guess I just love seeing tech companies actually innovating like this because what these guys are doing is so much more than just giving us new stuff to goof around with on our cell phones. These are tools that will grow to enhance our lives in ways that we probably can’t even predict yet, and that’s just very, very exciting to me. 😀