Nokia Unveils a Maps Service

http://www.here.com

by sravfeyn • 14 years ago

109 70 14 years ago

sravfeyn2• 14 years ago

Related article by TechnologyReview http://www.technologyreview.com/news/507186/nokia-unveils-a-...

mjs2• 14 years ago

"Here is available through a Web browser and as an iPhone app." Anyone know how to get the iPhone app? Doesn't come up on the store.

EDIT: Ah, the answer comes later: "Skillman also showed off the iPhone version of Here, which will be available as a free app in the next several weeks."

huskyr• 14 years ago

The 3d view is pretty impressive, although opening the webinspector crashed my Mac :(

risratorn• 14 years ago

Really impressed by the fluent 3D view and the exploration mode for some cities. Good job Nokia!

rplnt• 14 years ago

The aerial data for my location are at least 8 years old and very low quality. It's interesting to see so back into history but not really useful.

edit: comparing it to other sources, it seems like it's from 2003

kaolinite2• 14 years ago

Their street view is horrendously low quality. Would have thought that if you were going to go to the effort of mapping out streets (quite extensively too), you'd use high definition cameras.

mjs2• 14 years ago

FWIW, it's okay for me (London).

pisarzp• 14 years ago

I just checked London, and quality is definitely subpar to Google's Street View

bruceboughton2• 14 years ago

Central London - the imagery is horrendously low quality. Looks like camera tech from 6 years ago.

wim• 14 years ago

I was quite impressed they actually have a street view! Not sure which city you tried, but I just zoomed in on a random street in Helsinki, and it seems to be good enough to read some license plates (they might want to fix that).

kaolinite2• 14 years ago

Oh sure, I was impressed and surprised too. I was also impressed that it was WebGL rather than flash. That said - if you're going to spend a hell of a lot of money sending people into the streets of both major and minor cities - you might as well give them good cameras.

king-coconut• 14 years ago

Yeah, image quality seems to be lower than in google streetview, but it also runs much smoother at least on my machine.

nakedrobot22• 14 years ago

The streetview was made by Navteq using a Ladybug 3 camera, which is a pretty sad camera to use for this application. It is not very high resolution, it is intended more for panoramic video than for high resolution streetview-type capture. It also needs a ton of post production in order to look good.

aw3c23• 14 years ago

a Maps Service that Lives in the Cloud

What does that mean? Honestly, I do not understand it. Name-dropping the "cloud"? Is that meant to be negative or positive? Any big map service is bound to run on multiple redundant machines, isn't that the cloud?

Seeing http://static.here.sc/maps/39568/core/features/intropage/img... I cringe. Measuring distances like that does not work in the field, you can almost never walk in a straight line. Distances must be calculated by appropiate means of travel, eg streets for cars/bicycles or ways and walkable areas for pedestrians. Somewhere at Nokia a team of cartographers must be sobbing into their glasses of beer.

Looking at random places I know, I can debunk their claim of "Most accurate map". OpenStreetMap is more accurate at those. (Anecdote!)

This leads to my next critic. They want people fix/enhance the map data for them. But then it is NOT shared back, only as map image. The data stays with Nokia and you probably cannot even export your own contributions. Same as Google really.

Adding "social" to a map service is a great idea. I was always wondering why none of the big players did that.

The 3D stuff is amazing.

sravfeyn2• 14 years ago

The headline is taken from the article http://www.technologyreview.com/news/507186/nokia-unveils-a-...

I believe by cloud, they mean that the service can be accessed by any device with a browser, removing the necessity for a 'Maps App'.

chrischen• 14 years ago

So... like Google Maps?

MehdiEG• 14 years ago

Wow, this is going to be one spectacular flop.

Or how to turn something ridiculously simple (go to here.com to get Nokia Maps on your iPhone, since this is probably what Nokia is aiming at here) into an incomprehensible buzzword soup.

Nursie2• 14 years ago

Personally I liked their older model - a map and nav service that lived entirely on the handset. You could take the whole world with you, which is very useful in some of the more remote areas (like parts of Australia).

zippopalermo• 14 years ago

You still can...

Geee• 14 years ago

I believe here.net works also in offline mode with HTML5 local storage, at least the old Nokia maps version did. Maybe the 'collections' feature stores the actual data on your phone.

paulgb2• 14 years ago

>Measuring distances like that does not work in the field, you can almost never walk in a straight line.

I agree with you on everything but this. It's really useful to have a ballpark walking time estimate in a new city. It gives you a sense of scale. London has similar distance circles on their outdoor maps and it's quite helpful.

aw3c23• 14 years ago

But measuring distance over the actually existing possible routes is much more accurate and honest. See these random examples: http://resources.esri.com/help/9.3/arcgisdesktop/com/gp_tool... and http://blog.lib.umn.edu/levin031/transportationist//WalkingM...

Granted, this either needs more processing power server-side or a data model where the network (street, areas, etc) data is actually available on the client machine to calculate it.

edit: http://www.mysociety.org/2006/travel-time-maps/ is a very nice detailed write-up about those maps.

jpalomaki• 14 years ago

It would be interesting experiment to implement the distance measurement as "contour lines". Take random points from the map, measure how long it takes to walk there from current point, draw 5min, 10min, 15min etc curves.

aw3c23• 14 years ago

Check out http://www.mysociety.org/2006/travel-time-maps/ or http://www.nctcog.org/trans/data/traveltimes/

tonyblundell• 14 years ago

By using the term 'cloud' I think they're pitching it against traditional sat-nav style apps that require a large up-front map-pack download.

lotso• 14 years ago

The measuring distances thing is not really a big deal in my opinion. Many apps do the same thing. Yelp does a search in this area view, which I've used and thought was a good implementation of searching in a map. Foursquare has a similar feature as well. The distance may not be entirely accurate, but it is good enough, and probably a better UI model.

jpdoctor2• 14 years ago

> Name-dropping the "cloud"?

You must be new around here. :/

Edit: My favorite link of the past few months indicated the percentage of people who believed that bad weather would affect cloud services.

http://www.techspot.com/news/49980-majority-of-americans-bel...

fusiongyro• 14 years ago

Hey, if you're on Amazon East there's a correlation.

bruceboughton2• 14 years ago

What an abysmal name. Most of the time you use a web-based map and at least half the time you use a mobile map, you are not looking at "here" but where you want to go.

galaktor• 14 years ago

satellite image quality outside of major cities seems way better than on google maps, at least for some of the places in Ireland that I tried, i.e.

Here: http://here.net/53.3395769,-6.5376296,18,0,0,hybrid.day

Google maps: http://goo.gl/maps/V55lW

Edit: fixed google maps url

pionar• 14 years ago

haha, Ireland, i.e. - I see what you did there.

nachteilig• 14 years ago

The tilted 3D view has the same sort of skewing that Apple's new maps app has. Anyone know what it might be about the algorithms that make them do that?

bitL2• 14 years ago

Both are using C3's data. C3 is a company that provided 3D data to NOKIA for the first version of 3D maps released two years ago and NOKIA made a terrible mistake to allow Apple to buy it and use C3's 3D data for their own maps. The mesh simplification algorithm used is based on edge collapses according to an error threshold, hence the strange skewing.

Disclaimer: I worked for NOKIA L&C on 3D + cloud + navigation.

Too• 14 years ago

btw, hitta.se used the same(similar?) technology many years ago, but it required java or maybe even some proprietary plugin to be used. Don't know why it's gone now as it worked pretty good, and it had 3d coverage of cities that neither apple nor nokia has now :/

Do you know if apple and nokia bought exclusive rights, or why would hitta suddenly drop the feature?

ommunist• 14 years ago

Routing in the UK is much better on here.net than in Apple iOS6 Maps. Will Nokia release the iOS app?

joefarish• 14 years ago

Would Apple approve it?

platonichvn• 14 years ago

I'm impressed by how good the 3D view looks. Good to see that a company that is struggling is still trying to innovate.

flyosity• 14 years ago

None of the map tiles are retina-optimized, it looks terribly blurry on my iPhone. Also it doesn't try to autocomplete addresses as I type them in, I find that super helpful on all other map apps. Absolutely nothing makes me want to use this again.

liotier2• 14 years ago

What does "retina-optimized" mean ? Apple's love of closed systems has not yet extended to requiring specially processed images for optimal display on Apple hardware...

mongol• 14 years ago

It means that Apple marketing worked on flyosity.

sliverstorm2• 14 years ago

retina-optimized

We've got marketing departments to thank for that one. Leave it to them to invent another word for "high resolution".

Although, I suppose there probably was a need for a new word. "HD" has been strongly tied to 720p/1080p, so people associate "HD" with those qualities. They needed something that was more HD, without resorting to the silly name progression that was used in radio. (HF, VHF, UHF, etc)

upthedale• 14 years ago

Nice little experience as an Opera user when enabling the 3D view. It recognised my browser and explained quite simply how to enable WebGL. (Go to opera:config#UserPrefs|EnableWebGL and set the value to 1).

I think other websites could learn something from this, instead of thrusting a link to 'upgrade' my browser to chrome or safari or flat out failing.

dmd2• 14 years ago

Literally every single business (34 of them) within a quarter mile or so radius of my home is wrong. Either closed, grossly in the wrong place, or never existed in the first place.

ghshephard• 14 years ago

You didn't mention where you live. Canada? Australia? China? UK? Brazil?

dmd2• 14 years ago

Boston.

codewright• 14 years ago

Ditto...Mountain View, California.

JonLim• 14 years ago

Didn't realize this was posted higher than the other one. Anyhoo, I was initially unimpressed because I zoomed into Paris and the 3D view didn't work very well, but I discovered Toronto.

http://i.imgur.com/ldgtc.jpg

And you can view it yourself here: http://here.net/43.6461465,-79.3878013,15.9,349,72,3d.day

Very visually impressive and doubly so that it runs in my browser without any extra plugins and at such a smooth level.

achy• 14 years ago

The collision detection on the 3D view is strange. When you hit an object, the zoom level is decreased until you clear the object (in this case the top of a building).

hornbaker• 14 years ago

Whoa, trees are modeled in 3D.

marcusmacinnes• 14 years ago

Not sure what all the comments about the "amazing 3D" are about. Apple's 3D maps implementation is infinitely better (not that 3D maps are in the slightest bit useful...)

jarek2• 14 years ago

Now curious - can you post a screenshot of how the Royal Ontario Museum 'crystal' building looks like in Apple Maps? It's at 100 Queens Park, Toronto, ON. This is Here's view looking approximately west-south-west: http://i.imgur.com/psWne.jpg

Groxx• 14 years ago

Awkward 3 or 4 different interfaces with different ways to transition between them in each one. Links that go nowhere / don't really work / leave UI that doesn't move when you zoom. A decent effort, but less finished than even Apple's result.

jtarud• 14 years ago

Why are they rerouting here.com to here.net? Why use the .net if you have the .com?

thesash• 14 years ago

I just tried 2 searches. My current address, and my current city. Both failed. Google maps handles them no problem. They could have the best data and nicest maps, but if their search sucks, what's the point?

jarek2• 14 years ago

Vancouver satellite imagery is over three years old. Geolocation by Canadian postal code less accurate than Google or Bing.

Though points for detecting my browser and telling me how to enable WebGL for the 3D functionality, and Toronto 3D is pretty good.

zem• 14 years ago

ran into an odd bug right off the bat - "directions" generates a proper turn-by-turn list of directions, but the map pane goes blank rather than displaying the route.

blakerson• 14 years ago

Central Tokyo has about as much information as central Pyongyang.

tchap• 14 years ago

Anybody managed to get an API key for this service ? Seems that http://developer.here.net/myapps (which is linked elsewhere in the site and looks like the url for a developer dashboard) is broken (even when you're signed in or at least trying to sign in with a legit nokia developer account).

Nokia Unveils a Maps Service

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