New York Times (02/17/09) P. D1; Markoff, John
As cell phones are increasingly being used to interact with the digital world, the map is emerging as a new metaphor for how people organize and access information. Cell phones can provide maps and locations for nearby attractions, reviews of nearby restaurants, and the location of friends. Google recently introduced a location-aware friend-finding system called Latitude in 27 countries. Latitude provides a way for friends to find one another, or for families to stay in touch and monitor the location of their children, but it also will generate a plethora of data on where millions of people travel every day, leading to a wide variety of location-oriented applications and services. Many software designers believe that cell phones are currently undergoing a transformation similar to when the graphical user interface was introduced to the personal computer in the 1980s, making computers more accessible to the public. “We’re way early on, and we don’t know what the Macintosh of maps will be yet,” says former Apple software designer Paul Mercer. “But because of their relationship to the real world, maps will be a metaphor for a huge swath of mobile computing.” A variety of new smart phones “augment” reality by pasting a map over a phone-screen image of the user’s surroundings, allowing them to see a three-dimensional view of the environment, including descriptions and distances to objects. Currently, map-based cell phone applications generally translate paper maps into a digital format, but systems in the future will most likely meld the real world and digital displays and will allow users to better understand their surroundings.
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