Map My World

A dive into maps and how they are a powerful tool that can transform how we interface with consumer technology & media

Aug 05, 2020

Positron is a blog that covers topics related to technology, business, society, and everything in between that glues it all together. In this post, I discuss modern maps.

Source: Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

For thousands of years, cartographers crafted maps to help others understand and recall the world around us. The earliest known instance of cartography comes from Babylon around 600 B.C. The Imago Mundi, commonly referred to as the “Babylonian Map of the World” depicts features such as rivers, the rough positions of neighboring cities, islands beyond the “end” of the world, and even unknown areas the Babylonians believed to be home to a variety of mythological creatures.

The Imago Mundi

Source: Wikipedia

The Imago and other early maps are a reflection of the world as these peoples experienced it; they were largely used to depict the world in a historical sense and depict the cosmology of these early societies.

In modern cartography, we capture much more granular data that is grounded in a present, “factual” representation of the world rather than in cosmology, allowing modern maps to have much greater utility. In addition, in the wake of the Information Age and the rise of modern consumer technology, modern maps serve to augment our experience with our world in increasingly non-traditional and innovative ways.

Modern Maps as a Utility

In the early days of the internet, mapping services were very barebones, not quite user friendly, and were mainly used for routing and a few other key tasks. However, along with the internet’s rapid expansion in the past twenty years, mapping services have evolved with the same velocity.

Back in the mid 2000’s, I vividly remember my parents printing out MapQuest directions for places around the new city we had just moved to, as portable real time navigation was not ubiquitous at the time (which holds even today in many parts of the world).

Beyonce’s Thigh Meat @AyanaTheDIVA

Today's kids will never know how we were the original GPS right from the passenger side. And you better had read fast and correct

Today, services such as Google Maps and Apple Maps enable us to navigate, and much more, with ease from a variety of surfaces such as personal computers, mobile phones, cars, etc. Furthermore, the level of granularity and utility these modern mapping services provide is leaps and bounds better than what was available in the early 2000’s.

One of my favorite blog series is Justin Obeirne’s comparisons of Google Maps and Apple Maps which chronicle their similarities and differences over time. In his comparison from 2018, you can see that Google Maps has a much greater level of detail than Apple Maps, even going as far as to detail the HVAC units on the roof of buildings.

Google Maps vs Apple Maps

Source: Justin Obeirne

Since then, Apple has greatly improved its map by introducing a wide variety of features to Apple Maps such as a Street View-like feature called “Look Around” and a lot of the more granular data, like the outlines of individual homes & offices, that Google provides on Google Maps.

Apple’s Improved Map

Source: Apple

You can now see public transportation routes, live traffic levels, restaurant reviews, points of interest, and even message businesses directly through these mapping applications (Yellow Pages who?). Though we often take it for granted, the amount of time modern maps save us is astronomical (and can be very profitable).

Maps also play an important role in the implementation of other emerging technologies in the robotics world. In the autonomous vehicle space, for example, maps are a key component in many autonomous driving stacks.

For instance, when entering a new area, Waymo first pre-maps that specific locale in order to gain a “ground truth” of the environment their fleet of autonomous test vehicles will operate in. Any undiscovered or new discrepancies found later on during testing can then be back-ported to the original map, hardening it over time.

Waymo Autonomous Vehicle Perception

Source: Waymo

Modern Maps in Social Media

In comparison to the utility use case where maps are a means to an end, in consumer media, maps can ignite our curiosity and, in some cases, re-contextualize our experience with the world around us.

Discovery

In the blazing summer of 2016, I spent most of my time at my parent’s house and didn’t travel much for the whole season. Throughout the summer, I spent a lot of time using the then popular video streaming app Periscope. On Periscope, users can drag through a global map with a bevy of streams from around the world to choose from.

Periscope’s Global Map

Source: The Verge

When I first opened the app, I looked for streams that were broadcast by people near me. However, I lived in a pretty quiet area, and there was not much going on in the way of excitement, so I was not able to find any streams. Thus, I naturally began to scroll elsewhere on the map. As I “traveled” across cities, states, and countries, I had the opportunity to interact with a variety of people with very distinct backgrounds and experiences.

“I wonder what daily life is like in this location or that region?” I would think as I sought out streams that could help satisfy my curiosity.

I watched a man who walked around Hong Kong, detailing what it was like to live there as an expat, a bodega owner chronicling his days at his shop in New York, a university student from the UK well known for her bants, an L.A based socialite and model, a young couple from New Zealand, and even horseback riders from near my parents’ hometown in Nigeria.

Although I was at home for most of the summer, I felt as if I had traveled the world. For me, using Periscope was an experience more akin to using Google Earth than to using another live streaming app.

Google Earth w/ Photos Overlay

Source: Google Earth

Today, Periscope is much less popular due to the launch of Instagram Live which stymied it’s growth, but, in retrospect, the experiences I had on the app did a great deal to widen my worldview in terms of understanding what day to day life is like in areas that were radically different from, and often times surprisingly similar to, my own.

Had I been suggested streams algorithmically, perhaps based on my locale or language, I would likely have not discovered even one of these amazing people, let alone multiple. The catalyst of my curiosity was the presence of the map.

During that same summer, another app showcasing an innovative use of maps, Pokemon Go, was released. It quickly became the hottest app of 2016, pulling in over $1 billion in revenue in it’s first year. It was one the first apps to become wildly popular whilst utilizing augmented reality (AR) and, at the time, many considered it to be an inflection point for the technology.

While I acknowledge that it is a very good use case for AR, I believe it would have seen the same wild success it saw that summer with or without AR.

What truly made Pokemon Go a phenomena was that it brought people together in a way that hadn’t been seen before. The catalyst that brought these people together was the map that indicated where Pokemon and other important game items were located in the real world.

The Pokemon Go map augmented the world around us in a way that completely recontextualized it. Suddenly, crowded urban centers became a boon for those looking for Pokestops, and the local pond or nearby lake transformed into a great place to catch Magikarp.

Whereas we can play games like the latest Animal Crossing while cooped up at home, Pokemon Go’s map was a forcing function which incentivized us to engage in exploration — one couldn’t succeed in the game without doing so (barring cheating of course).

Boon Sheridan @boonerang

Living in an old church means many things. Today it means my house is a Pokémon Go gym. This should be fascinating.

Gina @MissGinaDarling

Coronavirus and Animal Crossing is like that one summer with Pokémon GO but like.....opposite.

(Fun Fact: Before founding Niantic and working on Pokemon Go, John Hanke founded Keyhole which later became Google Earth after Google acquired the company in 2004)

Another instance of map usage which demonstrate their ability to augment our experiences with consumer media I have taken note of is Snapchat’s famous “Snap Map”. Unlike Periscope and Pokemon Go, Snapchat differs in the sense that Snapchat is a much more personal platform. The people you see on your map are not game items or strangers you will likely never meet in person, but are of friends, family, and other associates.

You are represented on the map as a Bitmoji, a 2D caricature of yourself that you can customize on a whim. Thus, rather than only seeing a friend’s location, you can see if they’re driving, in flight, listening to music, etc. all from just looking at their Bitmoji. The personification of all of this data gives the Snap Map a certain sense of vitality I have yet so see from other maps.

#TakeMeBack

Most recently, one map implementation that piqued my interest (and partly inspired this blog post) is the recent addition of a world map to Google Photos.

Photos is an even more private platform than Snapchat. Often, the only person who will ever see your photos is yourself and close friends and family. Here, the world map serves a different purpose. Rather than as a means to discover others, it allows one to peer into one’s own past via a visual history of their photos on the map.

Google Photos Map

Source: Google

Once the feature became available, I spent some time going through old photos and began to reminisce. I rediscovered old restaurants, scenic spots, and even places I only faintly remember visiting in the first place. As I continued to peruse the map, I saw photos I haven’t revisited in months, some even years. Seeing them again, being able to see exactly where I was at the time in the photos, and being able to remember exactly where I was when I felt so many different emotions, was an extremely powerful experience. It was as if the photos were telling the story of my life and travels, making the memories much more striking and vivid.

A Shop In San Francisco’s Chinatown

A Memory From My Days As An Intern Years Ago (We ❤️ 🥧)

After using the new feature, I began to wonder why Instagram did not make use of maps besides their use for viewing tagged locations in photos. As it turns out, they indeed once have a world map feature in which users could view their photos splayed across a map; however, the feature was removed in 2016 due to low usage.

Instagram’s Photo Map

Source: Instagram

One potential factor behind Instagram’s maps feature having less than ideal usage is that Instagram, although very much a personal platform, is more public than Google Photos and Snapchat.

Whereas in the Photos app your map is completely private to you, on Instagram, your map was viewable by your followers. Given that a vast majority of people do not have the ability to travel around the world to visit places their peers consider to be “interesting,” having your photo map subjected to the prying eyes of others may have been a source of anxiety that drove users away from utilizing the feature.

Reflections

Historically, maps are an incredibly useful utility that have only become more and more useful with the rise of the internet. While we often reason about maps in tech in the context of traditional “mapping” services, I seldom see maps recognized as an effective tool when it comes to consumer media; however, they can be a powerful conductor of user behavior.

In a world where we are increasingly concerned about the ideological silos that social media can funnel us into, maps can act as a wedge against that “localization” as they invite us to engage with our own curiosity and by incentivizing us to seek out those whose experiences with the world are different from our own. In times such as this, where the Covid-19 pandemic has many feeling stuck in their homes for what feels like forever, maps allow us to “travel” much like I did in the summer of 2016, eager and full of wonder.

Cheers,

Denalex Orakwue

I love to learn. As always, if you have a different perspective on this topic you’d like to share or have context on points I may have missed, please leave a comment below. If you enjoyed this post and want to read more of the Positron blog in the future, please subscribe!

Disclaimer: I work at Google as a software engineer. All sources are publicly available and all opinions are my own.

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