Wikifying the Physical World

Presently, the current Bing's iPhone app is a perfect example. The app includes so-called augmented reality features, which overlay computer data on real-life images, such as the view from a smartphone's camera. The Bing app can scan bar codes as well as book or DVD covers and return product information like reviews, prices, and links to merchants' sites.

An upcoming version of Bing Maps for mobile phones will bring this technique to geographical landmarks as well. Blaise says that in the near future a Bing-equipped phone will be able to scan and identify landmarks and then automatically provide hours of operation, reviews of nearby restaurants, and other relevant information.

The DLD friend and his team at Microsoft are also working on ways to introduce more information into the version of Bing Maps that people use from a stationary computer. While streetside views of building exteriors have become common in online maps, Blaise developed a new feature that takes Bing Maps users inside the buildings, providing a panoramic view of the interior. He is encouraging store owners and tourists to submit their own photos of interiors and automatically pulling public photo sets from Flickr. Microsoft software will stitch them together to create virtual representations of real places that users can explore.

"It's a way of wikifying the physical world," says Blaise about his ambitious goal. Read more about how Blaise teaches geometry to a search engine here and find the original article in the Bloomberg Businessweek. Also check out Blaise at the DLD 2010 panel "Search" with fellow panellists Ben Gomes (Google), Ilya Segalovich (Yandex), and Conrad Wolfram (Wolfram Alpha) below: