Locational Awareness on the Internet

Abstract

In March 2005, at the occasion of his 50th birthday, Bill Gates went public with his “Virtual Earth Vision” for local search in the Internet and stated:

"You’ll be walking around in downtown London and be able to see the shops, the stores, see what the traffic is like. Walk in a shop and navigate the merchandise. Not in the flat, 2D interface that we have on the web today, but in a virtual reality walkthrough.”

This implies an enormous advance in computing power, communications bandwidth, miniaturization of computing, increase of storage capacity and in the ability to model the human habitat (the Earth) in great detail in 3 dimensions, with photographic realism and at very low cost per data unit. Action followed this declaration by Bill Gates, and the transition of a then-10-year old Microsoft business segment called “Map Point” into a new Virtual Earth Business Unit was kicked off.