Apple’s iPhone arrival has ushered in new consumer awareness for Touch and Optical sensing. A quick sampling of the trend reveals all major mobile device suppliers are working towards next generation devices implementing both. The PND guys are getting in on the action as well—TomTom’s December 2006 patent for Navigation Device with Camera-Info overlays navigable attribution atop real-world, real-time video, eliminating the need for geometry and vector geodata representations. So, while Microsoft and Google race to model the 3D world for navigation and ad space scaling up the z-axis, TomTom again devalues geodata by leveraging inexpensive optics to position the real world over the virtual world.
So would you want Google’s World?
Microsoft’s Better World?
Or TomTom's Real World?
