Augmented-reality maps: Blaise Aguera y Arcas on TED.com →
Blaise Agüera y Arcas is the architect of Bing Maps at Microsoft, building augmented reality into searchable maps. He’s also the co-creator of Photosynth, software that assembles static photos into a synergy of zoomable, navigatable spaces.
In a demo that drew gasps at TED2010, Blaise Agüera y Arcas demos new augmented-reality mapping technology from Microsoft. (Recorded at TED2010, February 2010 in Long Beach, CA. Duration: 8:14)
His TEDTalk on Seadragon and Photosynth in 2007 is rated one of TED’s “most jaw-dropping.”
For years, techies have sought to display huge files in high resolution without crashing a computer. Blaise Agüera y Arcas did it, with technology called Seadragon. At the 2007 TED conference, he showed a multigigabyte quilt of slides, then magnified one slide to reveal the entire text of Bleak House, and finally zoomed in on one letter in the book. Seadragon dived in and out of the enormous images seamlessly, stunning the audience. Microsoft, which had already bought Seadragon, has since integrated the technology into photosynth, the 3-D photo application popularized by CNN in its presidential-inauguration coverage. As Microsoft incorporates zooming into more applications, Aguera y Arcas, 33, will transform how we experience visual data.
