TECHNOLOGY
22 | NewScientist | 8 June 2013YOU fancy going for pizza but you’re
new in town. Wouldn’t it be nice if you
knew where your friends who live
there liked to eat? That is one of the
ideas behind Google’s latest move to
automatically tailor maps for individuals.
At its annual developer conference
last month, Google announced that
it would be using data from users’
social-media friends to alter their
personal maps. A preview version
of the new-style maps is rolling out
around the world right now. At first
it will result in nothing more than
restaurant recommendations. But
it will eventually lead to a highly
augmented way to navigate, based on
a hidden world of data representing
the emotions, movements and actions
of other people.
The restaurant recommendations
will be based on ratings given by your
friends on Google’s social network,
Google+. The firm unified its privacy
policies last year to allow the sharing
of user data between its cloud-based
applications in order to build new kinds
of services, and ultimately sell more ads.
Besides the privacy issue, some
worry that personalised maps will only
enhance the so-called filter bubble
effect, whereby our own views or
prejudices are reflected back at us.Reducing the differing views to
which we are exposed may risk a
ghettoisation of the web. But others
believe creating a bespoke map for
each user has its benefits.
A family driving through New York
City as part of a road trip needs a
slightly different map than a lone
tourist on the way to the Statue of
Liberty, for example. Such context
plays a central role in defining what
information we need from a map,
says Georg Gartner, president of the
International Cartographic Association.“Experiences and emotions – and
those of my friends – are all part of
that context,” he says.
Gartner’s research group is working
on a system that embeds emotional
information into maps. Called EmoMap,
it uses smartphones to gather
people’s emotional responses to
their immediate environment, with
individuals ranking places on comfort,
safety, diversity, attractiveness and
relaxation. The results are compiled
into a “heat map” and overlaid on themaps of OpenStreetMap. This method
would allow people to plot the most
comfortable walking path through a big
city, for instance, or show the safest
route home, as judged by strangers.
Pete Warden, founder of travel-
mapping company Jetpac, based in San
Francisco, says personalised maps will
work best on a large scale. “Up-and-
coming restaurants would be really
interesting,” he says. By tracking
which restaurants Google Maps users
search for and navigate to in real time,
Google would be able to identify hot
new restaurants far faster than any
traditional media. “You can imagine a
billboard chart of which restaurants
are becoming fashionable for every
city,” says Warden.
Maps built on Google’s wider range
of data would allow for the popularity
of different routes, areas and
destinations to be tracked over time.
Warden ultimately sees map
personalisation as Google’s way to put
its massive caches of geographical
data to use, ultimately through future
versions of Google Glass. “Google
conquered ideas and culture with
search, now it’s trying to organise and
index the physical world,” he says.
“Glass and Maps are different lenses to
view the world with.” Hal Hodson^ nMaps that know you
Google is using social media to transform our relationship with maps
SEANGALLUP/GETTY“Google conquered ideas
and culture with search –
now it’s trying to organise
the physical world”InsIghT Social media
EVERYWHERE you look nowadays
there seems to be a QR code.
Those are the complicated square
patterns that contain links to
websites, for example, in a format
smartphone cameras can read.
Problem is, they need to be printed
in advance. What if they could be
created on the spot, like graffiti?
That’s the aim of a project from
Jeremy Rubin, working in the Viral
Spaces group under Andrew
Lippman at the MIT Media Lab.
Instead of taking a photo of the
code, people move their phone
over the pattern and Graffiti Codes
uses the phone’s accelerometers
to pick it up. The phone’s software
recognises the pattern and
converts it to code that digitally
links to a web page. A pattern can be
drawn on any surface with a marker.
Anyone can scan the graffiti with
their own phone and be pointed to
the same information.
Rubin says the hybrid digital-
physical tags could eventually be
used to offer coupons to shoppers
on the move, or even to recognise
movement patterns like walking up
stairs, triggering a message.
“Graffiti Codes are part of a larger
effort to make the world accessible
and understandable,” Lippman says.
“The idea is that it is easily created
by anyone and as easily detected.
Most other codes are harder to
compose and imprint.” Hal Hodson nGraffiti codes
let you surf with
a simple wave
PKRzYSzTOFDYDYNSKI/GETTY- To each their own–
130608_N_TechLast.indd 22 4/6/13 09:51:21