Locate | Pier 27, San Francisco, CA | May 30–31, 2018
By: Siyu Song
We’re enabling the 200M+ AR-capable mobile phones on the market to use apps that leverage map data in the real world. With the recent popularity of location-based gaming — where your GPS location and the things around you influence the game itself — we saw the potential of maps to power completely new user experiences.
This was the motivation for our Maps SDK for Unity, launched last year, and now Mapbox AR, our latest release. At Locate — two days of all things maps, location, and sensors — augmented reality will be a major theme. Right now most AR experiences focus on placing content on a flat surface like a table-top or wall, but the full potential of AR will be realized at world-scale.
The next generation of digital experiences will increasingly blend and interact with the real world — this requires high-definition location data. We are giving developers the tools to connect our live location database of the entire world so they can create new experiences that understand where you are and what’s around you. -Miroslav Lysyuk, Unity Product Manager at Mapbox
In the same way that Pokemon Go is using map data on land-use to determine which Pokemon to spawn or Hotstepper is using our POI data so the avatar’s haircut changes when you walk past a barber shop, navigation apps will rely on real-time, location data to anchor directional cues to the center of a path or road lane. Your travel app will need to know where to display a coffee cup so it appears at the entrance of a cafe, and logistics companies will need to merge dispatch data with the real world to create new AR dashboards that improve operations.
It doesn’t stop at AR on mobile phones. We’re partnering with wearable manufacturers like ODG to explore the potential of AR glasses. Wearables are challenging our understanding of what a map can be; whether it’s identifying what restaurants are within a building you’re in or rendering only the elements of a street pertinent to your trip — soon maps won’t be constrained to boxes.
At Locate, you’ll hear from leaders in the space like Adam Debreczeni, co-founder of Fitness AR, and now AR designer at Mapbox. Adam and his team just prototyped the first multi-user AR experience where two people can be in the same room or half-way across the world and annotate a map together.
One of the challenges Adam is solving is adapting our tools to inspire new user interactions with physical and virtual space.
For decades, most desktop and mobile apps have shared really simple design principles built around this concept of shuffling papers on a desktop. Everything tends to have a flat perspective, and we use 2D abstractions like an arrow, a pointer finger, or a grab-hand, to interact with objects on a flat plane. Interacting with 3D space is more like using a hammer than a mouse. -Adam Debreczeni, Mapbox AR Designer
Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore have simplified the camera physics, enabling developers to project AR content on platforms that reach billions of people. In a post-mobile world, where user interactions transcend the flat screen, maps are the invisible layer that turn floating content into useful context — this is world-scale AR. See you at Locate.
World-Scale AR @ Locate was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.