When I travel, I always use Google Maps app on my iPhone to find my way in a new country. Google Maps is The most valuable app for a traveler. It made my life so much easier and simplified any situation where I needed to get to a specific place whether by public transport or by foot.
My Experience Using Google Maps
As much as I enjoyed using Google Maps, I found the bookmarking feature to be not that useful for my needs. I mainly used it to mar points-of-interest and attractions or when I planned a day trip and wanted to visit several places on the same day.
In fact, one of the second most useful app for me was Google Photos. Why do you ask? because I could quickly locate a previous place I visit that I want to revisit by just running a search. Because it’s visual, it makes it super fast to identify the place that you’ve already visited. For example, there was a buffet that I’ve visited almost every week. Instead of marking it on the map or adding ti to a category, I just opened Google photos, wrote “Food” and tap the photo of the place. Because the photo is saved with geolocation data, I could just click the info button, see the location, click it and it would open it in Google maps. I did it many times for other places, like restaurants, and other places which I wanted to revisit.
Now, if you combine that data with specific user behavioral analysis you can easily extract data very accurately and use voice recognition to easily locate a specific place.
How Augmented Reality Can Improve Things
However, Augmented Reality has the potential to take indoor navigation and outdoor street navigation to a whole new level and turn navigation into a much more useful and enriching experience.
As I walked through the streets of Seoul and when visiting cities in Japan like Tokyo, Nara, Osaka and Kyoto, I had so many questions I wanted to ask. Many times the only thing I could do is ask someone, Google it, analyze a picture I took (using Google Lens), read tourist’s brochures or books, or search for a closeby tourist information service. I could have learned so much more and do it so much faster had I had a device that could teach me more about the place I am currently at without needing to spend precious time trying using different apps and trying to align that information to what I see in front of me to verify its authenticity. Let alone that AR indoor navigation for the places I was visiting doesn’t exist.
Street walking navigation in Augmented Reality is going to fundamentally change the way we learn about the world around us. Google Maps already understands different queries without the user even needing to leave the app. I get information about restaurants and user reviews, I can see all nearby attractions, find businesses, etc. However, using AR Cloud and other advanced technologies, companies can revolutionize the street navigation experience and make walking in streets a completely more useful and exciting experience.
That being said, to make that experience convenient and enjoyable to use, we need AR glasses. I’ve already tried a wayfinding navigation AR app called HotStepper and realized that not just it wasn’t convenient but also quite dangerous, as I was limiting my field of view as I was staring at the screen. The camera of the device had a focal length that wasn’t aligned with my eyes angle of view, adding the device’s bezels and area of focus to the mix, part of the scene was just not visible to me. Furthermore, it’s very uncomfortable holding a device upward for a long period of time. Even if the focal length could have been adjusted based on the distance of the camera’s sensor from your eyes and if the device was very lightweight, there are many other issues that impair the experience. Bottom line is that AR glasses are essential to delivering a safe, reliable and comfortable experience to indoor and outdoor augmented reality navigation apps.
Google teases AR features for Google Maps.
Now all those things can be really useful, but in the near future, those walking navigation apps will offer much more than they offer now.
Here are some of the feature that we might expect to have in Google Maps and other types of walking navigation augmented reality-based mobile apps:
- Indoor navigation assistant
- Watching restaurant rating and opening hours while exploring a certain street
- Get notification of incoming events in the area you are currently at or for areas close by
- See most popular merchandises and sales for nearby stores
- Add pinpoint notes to actual real-life places or objects to revisit them later
- Add visual reminders and alerts that pop-up when you are near a certain place
- See overlay navigation aid visuals on real-world surfaces
- Let people mark areas of interest in the real world in real-time as they view the scene from a remote location
- See warning signs
- See detailed information about different items, landmarks and points-of-interest that were recognized by the image recognition system
- Get instant translate of signs from one language to another as you walk across the street
- Highlight a certain area in front of you so it can be easily recognizable
- Easily recognize public transportation location
- Locate businesses on a specific floor of a building with direct navigation to which elevator to take to reach there
- See a live crime map to identify dangerous areas
- Identify and highlight an incoming bus that you should take
- Identify people through crowd using shared location service. So for example, if you reach a place with thousands of people, you can easily see where your friend is located and walk towards him. If your daughter is hanging out with friends in the park, you can always get a visual cue that shows where she is located
- See rental prices as you walk through the street
- Get alerted when the traffic light changes to green
- Get educational information about different plants, cars or other items as you walk through the street
- Get information how tall a building is
- Get clear navigation routes when hiking
- Get directions how to get into a specific booth in a large exhibition
- Shows you areas which you’ve already visited
This is just a short list of some of the things that we might get to have in future AR-based wayfinding navigation apps in the near future.
I have a good feeling that when Apple introduces their AR/VR glasses, we are very likely to see many of those advanced AR-based features in its Maps app or a completely new and redesigned navigation app.
I’m very interested in that particular topic and can’t wait to see what the leading companies are going to come up with. I’m pretty sure those type of apps are going to be one of the most useful ones for me, especially when traveling to new cities in a foreign country that I haven’t visited before.