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Nokia Unveils a Maps Service
Related article http://www.technologyreview.com/news/507186/nokia-unveils-a-map-service-that-lives-in-the-cloud/
- sravfeyn 14y agoRelated article by TechnologyReview http://www.technologyreview.com/news/507186/nokia-unveils-a-map-service-that-lives-in-the-cloud/ http://www.technologyreview.com/news/507186/nokia-unveils-a-...
- mjs 14y ago"Here is available through a Web browser and as an iPhone app." Anyone know how to get the iPhone app? Doesn't come up on the store. EDIT: Ah, the answer comes later: "Skillman also showed off the iPhone version of Here, which will be available as a free app in the next several weeks."
- huskyr 14y agoThe 3d view is pretty impressive, although opening the webinspector crashed my Mac :(
- risratorn 14y agoReally impressed by the fluent 3D view and the exploration mode for some cities. Good job Nokia!
- rplnt 14y agoThe aerial data for my location are at least 8 years old and very low quality. It's interesting to see so back into history but not really useful. edit: comparing it to other sources, it seems like it's from 2003
- kaolinite 14y agoTheir street view is horrendously low quality. Would have thought that if you were going to go to the effort of mapping out streets (quite extensively too), you'd use high definition cameras.
- mjs 14y agoFWIW, it's okay for me (London).
- pisarzp 14y agoI just checked London, and quality is definitely subpar to Google's Street View
- bruceboughton 14y agoCentral London - the imagery is horrendously low quality. Looks like camera tech from 6 years ago.
- rthomas6 14y agoFrom 2006? Was camera technology really improved that much since then?
- nakedrobot2 14y agoAbsolutely it has. Resolution, noise, dynamic range have all improved dramatically since 2006. Compare the Canon 5d (1) from 2006 and the 5d Mk3 from this year - pretty decent comparison. It is no contest.
- wim 14y agoI was quite impressed they actually have a street view! Not sure which city you tried, but I just zoomed in on a random street in Helsinki, and it seems to be good enough to read some license plates (they might want to fix that).
- kaolinite 14y agoOh sure, I was impressed and surprised too. I was also impressed that it was WebGL rather than flash. That said - if you're going to spend a hell of a lot of money sending people into the streets of both major and minor cities - you might as well give them good cameras.
- aw3c2 14y agoa Maps Service that Lives in the Cloud What does that mean? Honestly, I do not understand it. Name-dropping the "cloud"? Is that meant to be negative or positive? Any big map service is bound to run on multiple redundant machines, isn't that the cloud? Seeing http://static.here.sc/maps/39568/core/features/intropage/img/shots/around-here.png http://static.here.sc/maps/39568/core/features/intropage/img... I cringe. Measuring distances like that does not work in the field, you can almost never walk in a straight line. Distances must be calculated by appropiate means of travel, eg streets for cars/bicycles or ways and walkable areas for pedestrians. Somewhere at Nokia a team of cartographers must be sobbing into their glasses of beer. Looking at random places I know, I can debunk their claim of "Most accurate map". OpenStreetMap is more accurate at those. (Anecdote!) This leads to my next critic. They want people fix/enhance the map data for them. But then it is NOT shared back, only as map image. The data stays with Nokia and you probably cannot even export your own contributions. Same as Google really. Adding "social" to a map service is a great idea. I was always wondering why none of the big players did that. The 3D stuff is amazing.
- sravfeyn 14y agoThe headline is taken from the article http://www.technologyreview.com/news/507186/nokia-unveils-a-map-service-that-lives-in-the-cloud/ http://www.technologyreview.com/news/507186/nokia-unveils-a-... I believe by cloud, they mean that the service can be accessed by any device with a browser, removing the necessity for a 'Maps App'.
- Nursie 14y ago
- bruceboughton 14y agoWhat an abysmal name. Most of the time you use a web-based map and at least half the time you use a mobile map, you are not looking at "here" but where you want to go.
- galaktor 14y agosatellite image quality outside of major cities seems way better than on google maps, at least for some of the places in Ireland that I tried, i.e. Here: http://here.net/53.3395769,-6.5376296,18,0,0,hybrid.day http://here.net/53.3395769,-6.5376296,18,0,0,hybrid.day Google maps: http://goo.gl/maps/V55lW http://goo.gl/maps/V55lW Edit: fixed google maps url
- pionar 14y agohaha, Ireland, i.e. - I see what you did there.
- nachteilig 14y agoThe tilted 3D view has the same sort of skewing that Apple's new maps app has. Anyone know what it might be about the algorithms that make them do that?
- bitL 14y agoBoth are using C3's data. C3 is a company that provided 3D data to NOKIA for the first version of 3D maps released two years ago and NOKIA made a terrible mistake to allow Apple to buy it and use C3's 3D data for their own maps. The mesh simplification algorithm used is based on edge collapses according to an error threshold, hence the strange skewing. Disclaimer: I worked for NOKIA L&C on 3D + cloud + navigation.
- Too 14y agobtw, hitta.se used the same(similar?) technology many years ago, but it required java or maybe even some proprietary plugin to be used. Don't know why it's gone now as it worked pretty good, and it had 3d coverage of cities that neither apple nor nokia has now :/ Do you know if apple and nokia bought exclusive rights, or why would hitta suddenly drop the feature?
- bitL 14y agoYes, hitta.se used C3 (Java IIRC). I believe it was their pilot project as both companies are from Sweden (possibly with government/universities involvement) and they used airplane stereovision to generate 3D, which would explain fantastic detail of the whole Sweden (I remember looking at the funny rotated skyscraper in Malmo). To be honest, I don't know why did hitta.se drop its 3D maps. I was playing with hitta.se before NOKIA bought the technology from C3 and there were internal rumors that C3 will be acquired. I would assume licensing costs were the main culprit; given the use of airplane flyovers, the data extraction was very expensive.
- ommunist 14y agoRouting in the UK is much better on here.net than in Apple iOS6 Maps. Will Nokia release the iOS app?
- joefarish 14y agoWould Apple approve it?
- platonichvn 14y agoI'm impressed by how good the 3D view looks. Good to see that a company that is struggling is still trying to innovate.
- flyosity 14y agoNone of the map tiles are retina-optimized, it looks terribly blurry on my iPhone. Also it doesn't try to autocomplete addresses as I type them in, I find that super helpful on all other map apps. Absolutely nothing makes me want to use this again.
- liotier 14y agoWhat does "retina-optimized" mean ? Apple's love of closed systems has not yet extended to requiring specially processed images for optimal display on Apple hardware...
- mongol 14y agoIt means that Apple marketing worked on flyosity.
- sliverstorm 14y agoretina-optimized We've got marketing departments to thank for that one. Leave it to them to invent another word for "high resolution". Although, I suppose there probably was a need for a new word. "HD" has been strongly tied to 720p/1080p, so people associate "HD" with those qualities. They needed something that was more HD, without resorting to the silly name progression that was used in radio. (HF, VHF, UHF, etc)
- liotier 14y agoThere are quite a few standard denominations for resolution : ★VGA, ★XGA, Q★XGA etc. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_display_resolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_display_resolution for the whole collection. And then there is the ★HD family : nHD, qHD, HD (720p), FHD (1080p), QHD, QFHD (4K), UHD... Those are established and provide a somewhat logical progression from HD. But then I may just underestimate Apple's need for branding and the prevalence of NIH at the marketing department.
- sliverstorm 14y ago
- upthedale 14y agoNice little experience as an Opera user when enabling the 3D view. It recognised my browser and explained quite simply how to enable WebGL. (Go to opera:config#UserPrefs|EnableWebGL and set the value to 1). I think other websites could learn something from this, instead of thrusting a link to 'upgrade' my browser to chrome or safari or flat out failing.
- dmd 14y agoLiterally every single business (34 of them) within a quarter mile or so radius of my home is wrong. Either closed, grossly in the wrong place, or never existed in the first place.
- ghshephard 14y agoYou didn't mention where you live. Canada? Australia? China? UK? Brazil?
- dmd 14y agoBoston.
- codewright 14y agoDitto...Mountain View, California.
- JonLim 14y agoDidn't realize this was posted higher than the other one. Anyhoo, I was initially unimpressed because I zoomed into Paris and the 3D view didn't work very well, but I discovered Toronto. http://i.imgur.com/ldgtc.jpg http://i.imgur.com/ldgtc.jpg And you can view it yourself here: http://here.net/43.6461465,-79.3878013,15.9,349,72,3d.day http://here.net/43.6461465,-79.3878013,15.9,349,72,3d.day Very visually impressive and doubly so that it runs in my browser without any extra plugins and at such a smooth level.
- jtarud 14y agoWhy are they rerouting here.com to here.net? Why use the .net if you have the .com?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- achy 14y agoThe collision detection on the 3D view is strange. When you hit an object, the zoom level is decreased until you clear the object (in this case the top of a building).
- hornbaker 14y agoWhoa, trees are modeled in 3D.
- marcusmacinnes 14y agoNot sure what all the comments about the "amazing 3D" are about. Apple's 3D maps implementation is infinitely better (not that 3D maps are in the slightest bit useful...)
- jarek 14y agoNow curious - can you post a screenshot of how the Royal Ontario Museum 'crystal' building looks like in Apple Maps? It's at 100 Queens Park, Toronto, ON. This is Here's view looking approximately west-south-west: http://i.imgur.com/psWne.jpg http://i.imgur.com/psWne.jpg
- Groxx 14y agoAwkward 3 or 4 different interfaces with different ways to transition between them in each one. Links that go nowhere / don't really work / leave UI that doesn't move when you zoom. A decent effort, but less finished than even Apple's result.
- thesash 14y agoI just tried 2 searches. My current address, and my current city. Both failed. Google maps handles them no problem. They could have the best data and nicest maps, but if their search sucks, what's the point?
- jarek 14y agoVancouver satellite imagery is over three years old. Geolocation by Canadian postal code less accurate than Google or Bing. Though points for detecting my browser and telling me how to enable WebGL for the 3D functionality, and Toronto 3D is pretty good.
- zem 14y agoran into an odd bug right off the bat - "directions" generates a proper turn-by-turn list of directions, but the map pane goes blank rather than displaying the route.
- blakerson 14y agoCentral Tokyo has about as much information as central Pyongyang.
- tchap 14y agoAnybody managed to get an API key for this service ? Seems that http://developer.here.net/myapps http://developer.here.net/myapps (which is linked elsewhere in the site and looks like the url for a developer dashboard) is broken (even when you're signed in or at least trying to sign in with a legit nokia developer account).