Google are building various tools which allow users to contribute data (especially to maps). However they don't provide an easy way for users to choose to release their own contributions under an open license. I asked Marissa Mayer this question at SXSW 2011 and she said they would change it, however I haven't seen this happen. I would very much like to see Google change their policy so that by default any user generated contributions are released under a license which permits reuse without further permission from Google.
One of my fellow panelists from Google discussed ways for developers to use Google's existing map tools to create their own indoor map content. This uses the Google Maps slippy map API, but doesn't require the developer to submit indoor map data to Google: http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/sessions/map-your-busin...
I would also like to see indoor map data, especially for public spaces, be more freely (libre) available. There are a few contributors at OpenStreetMap working on indoor maps, but privacy/data structure/data acquisition pose significant challenges. I'm sure they'd be interested in your help!
Yes, we can live without indoor maps, but we're suffering through a lot of inefficiencies just because we don't know yet that there's a better option.
I want indoor maps because they can help reduce healthcare costs. It costs us all money when people get lost in hospitals. While environmental signage helps, it's often not sufficient. Visitors end up interrupting doctors and nurses to ask for directions. This directly costs the hospital money (leads to higher personnel costs), and leads to a poor customer experience (affects the recovery process for patients and families). It is surprising how many people get lost in hospitals: http://twitter.com/lostinabuilding
In addition to navigation, there are uses for facilities management, inventory management, real estate sales, and analytics on how people use buildings. I'm a big fan of using data to improve human efficiency, and these can help save time/energy/money.
For retail environments, indoor maps present targeted advertising opportunities, which can lead to more efficient advertising spending for brands and retailers, and time savings for consumers. This is part of why Google is so interested in indoor maps.
Indoor mapping will be incredibly useful for those who are disabled. Knowing where to find ramps and elevators is great for mobility and for safety, but I think that for a blind person the possibilities are even greater. Being able to navigate a building independently using an application on one's phone, for instance. Maybe Google's indoor maps won't be the end-all solution, but will hopefully get institutions thinking about the possibilities.
There's two sides to this. There's the corporate/public-good argument, where wikipedia is probably the best OSM analog, so it makes sense.
But there's also the user generated content argument, where there are plenty of for profit companies that completely depend on content given for free by their users (youtube, reddit, etc), where the users also benefit from having better content on a site they visit and more attention to the content that they post. From that way of looking at things, it makes perfect sense for property owners to want to have their floor plans up on google maps.
In any case, I disagree that paying to access the maps API is necessarily bad...any OSM host will also charge over any trivial amount of traffic because none of them have the (free) infrastructure to handle it. I do agree with other posters, though, that there should be Data Liberation Front coverage for things like this and data contributed through map maker, and that it should have been that way for years now.
Imagine a large chain of shop sets aside an employee to upload the floor plans for each of their stores. The company would probably find it beneficial if they could download/make available the result of using the tool, so that if they wished they could also make the floor plan available to other map providers.
The normal user will still be able to use them for free. Google, however, can't use the uploaded data for free, but has to invest quite massively in order to prepare it for consumption.
Only sites that pay are sites with many thousands of requests per day. They're more paying for the infrastructure overhead than data. Would you rather have Google Maps covered in ads, ala Search, or have the top 1% of companies making money from the product pay for it?
You can't get even an offline dump for statistical/data-mining purposes, though; it's not only real-time, live use of the data that's restricted. That's why I contribute to OpenStreetMap but don't participate in any of Google Maps's crowdsourcing efforts, because I want the data to be available for bulk download to enable various kinds of analysis and reuse.
If Google provided bulk downloads I'd support their service, though, even if the online API required payment, because I do think it's reasonable to charge people who're using Google's infrastructure as basically their webapp backend.
How long until someone uses these to make first person shooter game maps automatically? (Using Google Maps outdoor mapping data for games is a great idea, like the tower defense game from a couple days ago).
My Google Maps game idea is a Cannonball Run/Gumball Rally driving game. Players race little cars on Google Maps' road lines. A single-player game would be for point A to B time trials. A game server would all multiple players to race head-to-head. To control the game difficulty, you would choose a map zoom level, giving you access to more shortcuts but requiring more navigation.
The advanced version of this game would use Google Street View for first-person racing!
Why not take texture samples from the locational photos already provided. Even if that was the only human interactive stage where the "designer" literally only marks sections of images for the textures.
Ceiling heights can likely be extrapolated simply from photographs with the right programming. Find a photo with 5 people in it and approximate the building height from the peoples photographs.
I personally can approximate the height and width of a house simply by counting bricks and shingles, because I work in construction I need to know if my scaffolding poles or ladders will reach and you're lucky if you get a tape measure to extend past 7ft without it buckling. (a sheet of shingles is 2ft wide, so every 3 shingle tabs is 2 ft. A brick and mortar roughly make 4", so 3 courses of brick make roughly 1ft. vinyl siding is normally double 4.5", double 5" or double 6" per sheet in height, one sheet is 12' long. Concrete board is generally 3ft by 8" high. Aluminum is always 8" high, generally 12' or 12.5' wide; If I can do this without a pencil and paper inside 30 seconds, it shouldn't be difficult to make an algorithm to work this out.)
Extrapolating the interior of a building would likely be much harder, however pictures of these often come with scale references (IE people), but as with outside everything has to meet building codes and everything is made out of standardized parts. However, one great clue is handrails. First floor railings have to be a minimum of 36" high, second floor railings have to be a minimum of 42" high (standard is 42" by code for commercial spaces, regardless of height). Maximum 4" gap between vertical members, (generally made 4" on centre as a precaution), and no horizontal members between 4" in height and 35" in height as to make a railing climbable by a small child.
Turning a rendering of an entire mall level in a game into simply picking colour swatches would be huge. Yes a pro studio is going to invest more time in polish, but for the guy making an iPhone app and is never going to see a huge return on the time he invests. Then accepting a bit of 'cookie cutter' genericness in level design won't be a huge compromise if it's in a great game.
The national building codes of countries would give you all the information you need to extrapolate the size of rooms and buildings.
In the US, "Blueprints" etc. are protected by copyright and the vast majority are provided to building owners under very restricted usage rights which do not anticipate such use.
The suggestion that people just upload them is somewhat problematic in so far as it is akin to Napster's approach to music a decade ago.
IANAL but it seems to be that the layout of a particular existing building is factual information and therefore cannot be copyrighted, just like the location of streets cannot be copyrighted.
I guess it's slightly more hairy because architecture is considered to be artistic as well as functional, whereas street layouts are generally only considered to be functional, but I still think that would stand.
I submitted four floors worth of plans for a building on our campus probably close to two months ago; they are still "pending review"
There is no way to get feedback about the process and no indication on where in the queue our submissions are.
There are probably 40 buildings on our campus that I was going to submit floor plans for. However, I was using this first building as a guinea pig of sorts. I can't imagine spending the time to get the other 39, multi-floor, buildings aligned in their system if there is little likelihood they will ever end up in the system for public consumption.
Taking bets on the odds of this being disallowed for places where it would be actually useful (for example: airports; municipal buildings; skyscrapers).
which is weird, because in the android maps application, SFO is completely filled in with a floor plan (and actually more detailed than the bing version, which appears limited to coarsely positioned rectangles for sections of the floor plan).
Is there some poor UI incantation you need to do to get this to appear on google maps?
This could well have the same unintended effect that automated checkout had with stores. Stores want you to wander around being lost, so they have more time to keep you awash in marketing. In the end, though, it will be more of the same nonsense as "sticky" portals in the dot.com days. People know the utility of information, and dislike it when you keep information from them so you can market to them.
Data access/usability vs. security/privacy is a worthy concern for building data. I think we will see a designation made based on level of detail. Blueprints (with details about structural features) should not be publicly available. However, simplified floor plans for public spaces are already publicly displayed, as required for fire evacuation purposes.
Where that "level of detail" line is drawn is an important discussion as the availability of indoor maps from Google, Bing, OSM, Micello, etc. continues to expand.
The view to align the map is very non-intuitive. It would be simply easier to just pick where the map should overlay first and then fine tune the alignment.
agreed, the two-screen, three-point alignment system is finicky and needlessly complex. All you need is pan, scale, and rotate functions to get the job done. Much more intuitive.
What it's doing is setting ground control points that can be passed to a tool like gdal_translate[1]. That three-point alignment deal is setting three pairs of points made up of a lat,lng on the world, and an x,y on the image. Most world map projections cause distortion that can't be compensated for with just pan, scale, and rotate. The GCP jazz can.
But I'm in agreement, their UI to set the GCPs is terrible. :-P
Good call. Looking into this further, looks like you're right.[1] For the Mercator projection, translate, scale, and rotate are sufficient for the georectification of small images (read: floorplans). You'd need more of the affine toolbox if you used something like Mollweide (mostly sheer, right?), and then you might need non-affine stuff to deal with crazier projections.
I guess, then, that begs the question of why the Google floorplan submission UI uses that weird double-pane thing?
They can, and I imagine will, make it available on web. But the iPhone Maps application isn't developed by Google, so they can't add it. It looks like Apple moving away from using Google maps, anyhow.
While the technology for making indoor map content (georeferencing a floor plan) is already widely available, most smartphones do a very poor job of positioning themselves indoors. GPS doesn't work inside, leaving cell and wifi trilateration as the most readily available alternatives.
Another likely factor for Google deploying on Android only is the ability to use wifi signal strength data from the phone to do approximate indoor positioning (the you-are-here "little blue dot"). Apple chose to lock developers out of the API for reading wifi signal strength, which limits the iPhone's ability to do indoor positioning (or show you nearby wifi routers).
In Apple's defense, the indoor positioning experience on Android does not meet the high expectations that GPS has set for users. Instead of a precise little blue dot, you get a 10-30m wide big blue circle. Some of the positioning hardware announced from chipset makers like CSR and Broadcom may improve this situation in the next generation of handsets.
Maybe, but they seem to be going for helping people find things in places like malls and such. So instead of using a directory (which can sometimes be few and far between), you find it on your phone. Also, you can probably sync with your location so you have a real-time "You are here!" icon.
Most large retail outlets will probably opt out of this initiative. A big part of their revenue model hinges on the "impulse buying" which occurs as you wander throughout the store looking for your items. There is a reason why no major department or grocery chain (that I am aware of) has a store directory at the front like most malls do.
However, if crowdsourcing is allowed this could become major. I and 20 other people could all map out the Walmart (for example), upload the data, and then whatever matches in 80% of the submissions would become part of the "map".
If enough people did that it would almost force the major chains to participate, if for no other reason than to maintain control of their maps.
This is probably only partially true. If the goal was really to confuse you, they would not put related products near each other (the cheese would be with the bananas, the milk would be with the dishwasher detergent, etc.) They would also rearrange the store every week, so that you wouldn't be able to learn where items are.
Honestly, I've never seen stores arranged for impulse buying except to have certain items promoted above others. Eye-level shelves, displays at the front of aisles, etc. Otherwise, the fruits and vegetables are together, the canned items are together, the milk and cheese are together, etc. Pretty much every grocery store I've ever been in has been laid out in approximately the same way.
So I'm worried that you may be propagating an urban legend.
Thanks for the interesting perspective. I've actually opened, run, and sold a retail store before (mobile phones and accessories) so, while the type of layout logic I referred to in my comment above did not apply to my store (because it wasn't large enough) I did read ALOT on the subject and was part of the local Chamber of Commerce so I can assure you that impulse buying considerations are a big part of why stores get laid out the way they do.
There are even consulting firms that make a tidy income by advising stores on product placements within the store for maximum sales.
Sure, but how does a map defeat the measures stores take to get you to buy impulse items. If you want to buy milk, there are two possibilities. The first is, you know exactly which brand of milk you want to buy, and you will seek it out explicitly. Or, you don't care, and will pick whatever's easiest. That's the area for optimization: pick the highest profit milk and make it the first one the doesn't-care-about-milk consumer sees. Put lots of impulse items on the way to the milk. And so on. A map on the phone does nothing to prevent impulse buys.
On the other hand, why even bother going to your store when groceries can be ordered online and delivered? Then you don't need a map at all.
It's a pretty interesting development for me to watch as the app I'm currently working on named Mashupforge (http://mashupforge.com) lets people easily create interactive maps out of image floorplans.
Does anyone have a link to a building with floor plans already uploaded? I'd be curious to see how they've designed the interface but can't easily find one... (i.e., in 2 minutes in downtown SF)
$1,000 says this will be featured in a heist movie in the next year. This is exactly the kind of tech I used to scoff at when the uber-skilled hacker pulls up a 3D map of the target building.
What's preventing people from uploading incorrect floor plans? Plus, with no standard floor plan format, I don't see how this is useful, beyond showing another helpful picture of a location.
Good question. This is why a more transparent indoor mapping process could breed innovation (a standard format) and better curation (allowing users to find and fix incorrect floor plans, a la OpenStreetMap or Wikipedia).
[IANAL] If they draw them themselves, yes they can do what they wish.
On the other hand, in the US, using the "blueprints" is probably going to be a violation of the copyright of the design professional who prepared them.
Typical contract language restricts the Owner's use to "this project" and such rights terminate "upon completion of this project." [AIA Document B105-2007]
Upon execution of this Agreement, the Architect grants to the Developer-Builder a nonexclusive license to use the Architect’s instruments of service solely and exclusively for purposes of constructing, using, maintaining, altering and adding to the Project or the Development, provided that the Developer-Builder substantially performs its obligations, including prompt payment of all sums when due, under this Agreement [AIA Document B107 2010].
Just like using AirBnB is against most apartment leases, and crossing the street when the light is red is illegal. Welcome to a new age of civil disobedience, where people freely carry around ice cream cones in their back pockets on Sunday!
That's quite a different claim from the rights based argument advanced previously.
When it comes to Google, this isn't civil disobedience.
It's simply taking advantage of the fact that the copyrights it is interested in ignoring are mostly held by many different people unlikely to have the resources to enforce them vigorously.
BTW, it's Ice Cream Sandwiches Google wants everyone to carry.
Which is why they're trying to crowd source the maintainership: the idea is that airports and giant retail stores will have a built-in incentive to keep their maps updated. And it might be true.
But I'm a little mixed on this. Google maps, while great and useful, isn't an open source project. The data is closed and proprietary and not useful to the community at large. I'd much rather this be done under the umbrella of OSM or the like, or if nothing else published as a separate data set subject to open licensing.
A fair point, but it's only true in isolation. If they're in competition with another equally-well-stocked chain that has floorplans, then customers might prefer to shop at the niftier, more modern place with the fun maps. Note that big department stores have always had maps available at the entrance, it's not like they're inherently opposed to the practice.
Prices will just go up a bit across all items once this available in all/most stores, and the stores will stop relying on suckering us into buying a bit more than we want in order to keep their margins up. That's the small price we'll pay for the added convenience.
Have you seen Aisle411 for retail stores? They have some crowdsourced information (aisles in which products are located), which might be easier to maintain than more granular (exact Lat/Lon) location.
This nicely correlated to their Project Glass demo where the guy asks for directions 'inside' the book store. To turn that into a reality, Google will certainly have to crowdsource this info.
They are directly targeting the market that Point Inside is in. I'm curious why they did not just purchase them rather than building something that will need to gain traction?
No. There are ways to do indoor positioning indoors: WiFi fingerprinting and supersonic marks.
Triangulation (trilateration) the way it's used in GPS will not work indoors because it's impossible to build accurate signal propagation model – model would be extremely complicated.
On the other hand signal propagation model can be learned via sampling actual signals in different spots on site. There are two ways to sample signals: 1) direct 2) indirect (via statistical models like SLAM)
Positioning can be done by comparing signal strengths from model and actual device and feeding them to some statistical positioning algorithm like particle filter or LSE. These algorithms use not only signal strengths but accelerometer, gyro and magnetic sensors for movement model. Fingerprinting techniques can provide up to 30 cm accuracy.
Huge win of WiFi fingerprinting is that it works on existing consumer-level hardware. But the downside is that you cannot scan WiFi in iOS public API.
There is less accurate way to position user indoors using supersonic marks – and it works on any existing phone.
Companies who do indoor positioning: WiFiSlam, Qubulus, WalkBase, Google, Nokia and we (applying to yc :). Some provide APIs, some are in stealth mode and Google has indoor positioning in some US and Japanese malls and airports.
Personally I think that there is huge opportunity for location-aware apps for malls, airports, parking lots, hospitals, etc and it has not been tackled much by anyone yet.
There's such thing as inertial navigation (that's how missiles fly even with GPS assistance), and potentially you can use a phone's accelerometer for that.
We have a datacenter in downtown SJ and I was amazed when first parked there on the -3 floor underground. My car's in-dash nav works perfectly there :-) There's no even remote chance that GPS can work 3 stories down in a solid concrete building.
My question is at 28:30 http://audio.sxsw.com/2011/podcasts/GoogleMarrisaMayer.mp3