LOUIS GRAY: Welcome back to Google Developers Live at I/O.
Louis Gray here with Daniel Sieberg.
DANIEL SIEBERG: That's right.
And one of the big mentions of the keynote yesterday was, of
course, Google Maps.
We saw a lot of big updates and refreshes.
And so yesterday, I got a chance to go
to the Sandbox here.
Some amazing stuff going on.
I think it's fascinating what people are doing tying into
the Maps API.
LOUIS GRAY: We're short on time before the next session.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Yes, we are.
LOUIS GRAY: So what we're going to do is we're going to
right to that interview that took place
with the Sandbox yesterday.
Let's go ahead and roll that video.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
DANIEL SIEBERG: Hi there.
I'm Daniel Sieberg with Google Developers
Live here at I/O 2013.
We find ourselves in the Maps Sandbox, and I'm joined right
now by Mano Marks, who is a Lead Developer
Advocate on the Maps team.
We're going be talking about Nintendo's Wii Street U. So I
want you to walk us through what this is all about, and
obviously bring in Ryan here for Nintendo.
MANO MARKS: Sure.
So hi.
I'm Mano.
This is Ryan Lund from Nintendo showing off the Wii
U, which has a great new Street View application using
the Wii U and the Wii U controller.
So do you want to walk us through it?
RYAN LUND: Yes, please.
Thank you, Mano.
So what we have here is we have Wii Street View.
This is a free application available on the
Nintendo Wii U console.
You can download it today from the Free Shop.
And what it is, it's an application written in HTML5
and JavaScript using the Nintendo web framework, and
that allowed us to really wrap and reiterate on this
application, as well as use the great Google Maps APIs to
bring in the Maps data and really make it a very
interactive experience with the Wii Street U and the
Street View data.
So I'm just going to walk you through this application a
little bit.
So what we have is first thing is I'm going to take you on a
tour, and so I'm going to load up on the game pad here some
recommended spots, and we're going to go ahead and jump
over to Florence, Italy.
And what you can see down here on the game pad is that I can
navigate the Street View information very naturally
with the gyroscope information from the game pad controller.
And you can see that we have really smooth motion.
I can go ahead and start navigating down
this Italian street.
And all of this information is stored in the Google Maps
servers, and it's really great that when we designed and
worked with this application, we had all of this content
available to us, all of these really good imagery that we
could just put and interface on top of.
One of the new features that we just enabled in the
application is integration with Wiiverse, which is
Nintendo's social platform.
So I'm going to go ahead and give you a
demonstration of that.
So this allows you to, when you find a location or a spot
that's really interesting, you can flag it and upload it to
the Miiverse servers and share it with your friends or share
it with the community so that they can
find those spots later.
So I'm going to select Latest Posts, and these are posts
that have been shared live by users of Wii Street View now.
DANIEL SIEBERG: So Mano, talk to me a little bit about
working with Nintendo, what that was like.
This is a very unique way of seeing the Street View imagery
through a gaming console.
MANO MARKS: It was a really exciting partnership because
their platform is based on web, so they're actually using
the JavaScript APIs to build this.
So this is something, theoretically, that anybody
who had their own platform and the right licenses could do
using the Google Maps API.
It's really an inspiring use, and I love to see the
coordination between the different devices there.
So you've got the controller and the Wii itself
displaying up here.
It's a really great implementation.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Great.
I just want to know when Mario is going to show up in one of
the Street View scenes.
RYAN LUND: We take feature requests, but I can't promise
that we'll get him in.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Cool.
Great.
Thank you so much.
MANO MARKS: Thanks a lot.
RYAN LUND: Thank you.
DANIEL SIEBERG: All right.
We're going to dive into our next partner now.
In fact, we're going to map dive into our next partner.
This is a new term that I'm learning here.
Mano joins me again, and Ben from Instrument.
So Mano, talk to me a little bit about what we're
seeing behind us.
I know that these are familiar to Googlers, this Liquid
Galaxy Display, but this is a unique way of presenting it.
MANO MARKS: So Liquid Galaxy is actually a
collection of hardware.
We actually open source the plans on how to build this, so
anybody could theoretically build this as long as they're
willing to invest in the hardware.
And it's a way of getting a bunch of different computers
and screens to synchronize together so you can do this
kind of large scale display.
And the instrument folks have done a great application
called Google Map Dive--
and you can actually see this in the background--
and this is all using HTML5 and the JavaScript API.
So why don't you tell us a little bit more about it?
BEN PURDY: All right.
So what you're seeing behind me here is all running in
Google Chrome.
We've got seven separate instances of Chrome each
running on a separate PC, and they're all being synchronized
through web sockets.
The game itself is running on an additional machine that's
hidden behind these displays here, and it's sort of keeping
track of the game state and then broadcasting that out to
all seven of the display nodes over web sockets.
And so the 3D game content that you can see the
foreground is a WebGL layer with a transparent background,
and behind that, we have a live HTML Google Maps region
that is transformed using 3D CSS.
And so using 3.JS, we're able to synchronize the camera
between the WebGL view and the 3D CSS view, and so what we
get is this really cohesive scene.
We're able to stitch the image between all seven monitors
just by offsetting the camera between each display.
DANIEL SIEBERG: So this is an entirely accurate
representation of Google Maps?
BEN PURDY: Yeah, you're seeing a live Google Map.
MANO MARKS: Yeah.
And in fact, the first question a lot of people ask
you is, is this term compliant?
BEN PURDY: Yes, it is term complaint.
We're not accessing tiles directly.
If I hadn't turned off the User Interface Events, you'd
be able to drag that map around if you had a mouse.
So the reason it looks a little nontraditional is that
we've used the Styling API extensively to create these
custom themes for each of the maps, but it is an actual
Google Map.
The way we're doing the sky haze, that kind
of causes some suspicion.
That's an OpenGL layer in the WebGL view that's simply
fading from transparent to the sky color that we've chosen.
And that way, we hide the hard edges of the corners.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Clearly this is a lot of fun and a lot of
people like us would like it in their living room.
What's the future of this?
Where is it going?
BEN PURDY: Well, our plan right now is to clean up the
code a little bit and get it running in a
single browser instance.
Right now, it's sort of distributed where we have the
server and the client separate and talking over web sockets.
But we're going to do some refactoring and get it running
in a single browser window, and then we'd like to release
it and open source it and maybe put it up on Chrome
Experiments or something like that.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Where does this rank in the uniqueness of
what some of the partners are doing?
This seems pretty awesome.
MANO MARKS: This is pretty high up.
We've got a really great sandbox this year.
This is pretty amazing, pretty impressive.
Really, really great to see this.
BEN PURDY: I don't know if you're watching this remotely,
but if you are here somewhere, you should come and play it.
It's a lot of fun.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Exactly.
All right, cool.
Ben, thank you so much.
BEN PURDY: Sure.
Appreciate it.
MANO MARKS: Thanks, Ben.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Well, I forgot that I loaned my car out to do
this next demo, I wish.
We're actually over at the Mercedes Benz part of the Map
Sandbox, and I'm joined now by Chris from Mercedes Benz to
talk about some really cool navigation features that are
built into this car.
First of all, what are we sitting in right now?
CHRIS BUSENBARK: So right now, this is an SL 550.
It's a pretty payment, so--
DANIEL SIEBERG: Yeah.
It's on the wish list.
CHRIS BUSENBARK: It's on the wish list.
LOUIS GRAY: So tell me about this screen that we're looking
at right here and what it can do.
CHRIS BUSENBARK: So this current screen, we want to
show off our Google APIs that we've implemented in this app.
All this right now is powered by a smartphone.
All the cellular data, all the network requests are going
over the cellular data.
So we basically just use this head unit
just for drawing stuff.
So this place is powered by Google Tile that we have here.
What it does is it takes away the tedious address entry of
enter in your city, enter in your state, enter in your
house number.
So what we can do here is we can select this tile and we
can set a destination.
So for example, let's just type in "8", like we want to
go to 88 Howard.
So what we do, we type in "8" and it autocompletes each time
we type in a letter, and this takes away us having to enter
in the location, the city, the street, and all that stuff.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Right.
And all of this is being done with this--
what do you want to call it, jog wheel down here?
CHRIS BUSENBARK: Right.
We call it a CCE, but rotary knob, whatever you
want to call it.
So we can just type in a random address, so let's do
like five, six, and 56th Street
DANIEL SIEBERG: So it's already suggesting ones that
would [INAUDIBLE].
CHRIS BUSENBARK: Correct.
So 562 Sutter Street.
We can select this, and now what we can do is we can view
Street View of this location.
And now since we have a rotary knob here, what we can do is
do a whole 360 degrees of the Street View, which allows for
a very intuitive kind of experience.
DANIEL SIEBERG: So you can really see, before you even
get there, what to expect.
CHRIS BUSENBARK: Correct.
It's just an awesome feature.
It really helps to be able to quickly go through the tiles
that are returned.
Another feature we have is the View All Map feature.
So this uses the Google Maps SDK, and what it does is
allows you to see the general area of the PoI.
So you can zoom out, you can zoom in.
If you zoom in far enough, you get the pretty little 3D
buildings that makes it-- ooh.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Sure, sure, just like you would on a
device, a mobile device.
CHRIS BUSENBARK: Exactly.
So this gives you a general idea of where stuff is.
So this search can also handle categories.
So what we can do is we can search general pizza.
So this will actually return us results of all the pizza
places that are currently around us.
It gives us the star rating that is returned, the price,
and the distance from us.
So for example, we'll select this pizza place and it gives
us a couple more details such as when it's opened, and we
can actually call the place too if we wanted to
preorder our pizza.
It gives us the same features.
It has Street View in it, viewing it on the map.
And also, photos.
DANIEL SIEBERG: User generated photos?
CHRIS BUSENBARK: So these are user generated photos that are
uploaded to Google.
Someone had a very good green onion pizza here.
And you can just scroll through them just to see if
you want to go to that place.
And that covers our Autocomplete feature.
Another feature we want to highlight on is our Traffic.
This also uses the Google Maps SDK.
It's just like your typical experience when you're looking
at Google Traffic on the web or the browser.
You know what the color lines are.
While you're driving, you can pan around, see what the
traffic is on the bridge, zoom in on the bridge just in case
you don't see the right color.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Doesn't look too bad right now.
CHRIS BUSENBARK: Doesn't look too bad.
It will later, right?
Everyone's going home.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Let's move on.
We've just got a little time left if you can show us the
last feature.
CHRIS BUSENBARK: So the last thing is a City Guide.
So what this is, it allows you just to view a variety of
categories around you.
So you can say, I want to know the nightlife around me.
And so you can select this, and it returns basically--
as you know a weather map, green means
light, red means heavy.
In this case, white means heavy.
So you know underneath that white little area, there's a
lot of night life and so you can go there.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Cool.
All right.
Put your seat belts on.
We are out of here.
CHRIS BUSENBARK: We're out of here.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Thank you so much, Chris.
That's going to do it for here at the Maps Sandbox with
Google Developers Live.
Stay tuned for lots more content right here.
I think I'm going to become a professional
map diver after that.
And just a quick shout out.
If you want to check out the new Google Maps, remember to
go to maps.google.com/preview and sign up.
LOUIS GRAY: Great.
Thanks for the preview.
We'll be right back at 2:20 to talk Chromebook Pixel.
Enjoy your sessions.