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With an eye in the Sky

In the summer of 1998 I took a weekend car trip across New England. I was using my notebook computer equipped with a GPS receiver and moving map software, which made getting from here to there a breeze. Except that when we tried to stop for breakfast at a highway exit that prominently advertised a McDonald's, there was nary a yellow arch to be seen when we left the highway -- and no sign to provide further guidance. What I really wanted was to be able to pull up a satellite image of the area, so that I could figure out which way to turn to feed the fires within!

As it happened, if mobile Internet access had been generally available back then (it was possible, just not too practical or cost effective), I could have used the then-new TerraServer Web site (http://terraserver.microsoft.com) to do just that -- to download a satellite image; although it was somewhat cumbersome to get the image centered on my location.

Now though, getting an eye-in-the-sky view of where I am (or where I'm going) has become quite a bit easier. With thanks to RCFoC reader Bill Chao for bringing this to our attention, we find that MapQuest now makes it trivially easy to get an airborne view of an area that we've just mapped!

For example, I went to http://www.mapquest.com/ and typed in New York, NY as the location, which brought me this map.

The new addition is the "Aerial Photo" tab (which only appears when you're mapping an area that has an aerial view available; currently limited to the large metropolitan areas served by GlobeXplorer - http://www.globexplorer.com/). Clicking on that tab brought me.

Notice how the aerial image exactly matches the map, both for location and scale. I was impressed. So I went back to the map window and instructed it to zoom in as far as possible

Then, again, I hit the "Aerial Photo" tab

Once more, an amazingly close match!

And I noticed that the aerial photo could even be zoomed-in one more notch (that's New York's City Hall Park in the lower-right corner). I was really impressed. This is integration of schematic mapping and eye-in-the-sky photographs that brings "ease of use" to a new level. And this is just the beginning of where this can go!

For example, even though the military doesn't offer us real-time imagery from their spy satellites, I went right ahead and explored more-detailed, live(!) views of New York! I checked out the scenery and the weather: And even live fish simply by exploring random New York WebCams that I found through Google (www.google.com) as I wrote this article!

And in a not too distant future that seems to me to be rather probable, instead of my having to go to multiple sites to grab these live shots, I can easily imagine some enterprising firm adding additional media to MapQuest's current schematic map and aerial image views, such as views from public and private traffic-monitoring cameras, security cameras, and WebCams, while seamlessly integrating them into the same interface! Then I would be able to continue my visual exploration of New York by clicking my way into ever-more detailed, live images, right from the same window! This is not a difficult extension to imagine or to implement, and if widely implemented, the result would be a fascinating and easily accessible look at life on our planet.

Yes, there are Big Brother implications along with the legitimate value that such visual access is already bringing, and as a society we do have to learn to deal with these issues in a safe and effective manner. But as you can see, the information is already easily available, and I can't imagine that it will be too long before someone implements the extensions I just described.

Our world is getting smaller at an ever-increasing pace.

Literally -- Don't Blink!

This is exclusive to it@tt. Excerpted from the "Rapidly Changing Face of Computing", a free weekly multimedia technology journal written by Jeffrey R. Harrow, Principal Member of Technical Staff for the Corporate Strategy Group at Compaq Computer Inc. A more extensive version of this discussion, as well as others around the innovations and trends of contemporary computing and the technologies that drive them, are available at http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc. Jeff's opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Compaq. The RCFoC is a service of, and Copyright 2001, Compaq Computer Corp. All Rights Reserved.

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