Tag: Maps

ScienceDaily (Apr. 5, 2010) If our eyes could see radio waves, the nearby galaxy Centaurus A (Cen A) would be one of the biggest and brightest objects in the sky, nearly 20 times the apparent size of a full moon.
What we can't see when looking at the galaxy in visible light is that it lies nestled between a pair of giant radio-emitting gas plumes ejected by its supersized black hole. Each plume is nearly a million light-years long.

A new system uses panoramic images to create navigation videos that highlight turns and landmarks.

A novel navigation system under development at Microsoft aims to tweak users' visual memory with carefully chosen video clips of a route. Developed with researchers from the University of Konstanz in Germany, the software creates video using 360-degree panoramic images of the street that are strung together. Such images have already been gathered by several different mapping companies for many roads around the world. The navigation system, called Videomap, adjusts the speed of the video and the picture to highlight key areas along the route.

Add infrastructure improvement to the list of things social networking is trying to tackle: GPS and mapping companies now use community feedback to improve everything from road information to traffic alerts and speed-trap warnings.

Tele Atlas, which provides maps to its corporate parent TomTom as well as to other navigation companies, on Wednesday rolled out its first geographic database containing information based on map users' feedback.