It’s pretty hard to deny the usefulness of Google maps. Not only can you play with a global map of infinite detail in seconds, but with the addition of Street View you can also view and explore places in first-person.

If you had to, one of the few holes you could poke in the platform is that it doesn’t really integrate the first person street view, into the bigger picture map.

The Here & There projection of Manhattan does just this, giving an enhanced first-person and brids-eye view of a city.  It puts the viewer simultaneously above the city and in it where she stands, both looking down and looking directly around them.

So far it’s been developed to a 2D representation of New York. However with location based technologies racing out of their infancy, how long until we start seeing this distorted but very handy view of our surroundings developed into a 3D interactive world? Could be very useful in digital city guides, games (GTA 8?), and mobile map apps.  

Tags: Innovation

This entry was posted on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Digital, Other things we like. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.