Yesterday, the second day of TED10, again offered attendees a bewildering but enriching intellectual diet. The technologies presented, especially, spanned the ridiculous and the sublime.
The sublime derived from Microsoft’s LiveLabs (fast becoming the fount of some of the most innovative work out of Microsoft). Blaise Agüera y Arcas, the architect of Bing Maps, demoed a new feature of Bing Maps, called “Streetside Photos,” that cool-ly combines the conventional street photographs offered by Bing, crowd-sourced images from Flickr, real-time video, and the 3-D modeling of Photosynth to create a truly immersive, 3-D, augmented reality of Seattle and San Francisco. (We wrote about Streetside Photos here.) Agüera y Arcas flew down from space into Seattle, wandered the streets of the city, entered a fish market, and showed us his friends from LiveLabs cavorting with crabs. (A bad TED joke: “Now we know that Microsoft researchers have crabs.”) Finally, he gazed up into the night sky to look at the surface of moon and explore the constellations. It was interesting to see Photosynth’s image-mapping technologies make their way into Bing Maps. Agüera y Arcas had demoed Photosynth at TED in 2007, and wowed the conference – but it was hard to imagine how the technology, no matter how lovely, would find real applications. Now we know.
Also sublime was a presentation by Gary Flake, the brilliant founder and director of LiveLabs. (Brilliant but modest: his Web page is “Flakenstein.net,” and he does, in fact, bear a passing resemblance to Frankenstein’s monster.) Flake showed Pivot, a technology he said “simply wouldn’t have been possible five years ago.” Microsoft describes Pivot somewhat deadeningly, thus:
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