Ed Parsons
He talks to Olivia Edward about
augmented reality and the fact that Ordnance Survey ‘had the best
television on the street but wouldn’t let anyone else see it’
I guess I’m an accidental geographer. I did O-level geography, which was okay, but the subject wasn’t particularly special to me. But afterwards, I went on a field trip to South Wales. Our lecturer was a hydrologist who was developing a simple computer model of groundwater hydrology. We went into the field, captured data, then came back in the evening and typed it into a computer, actually writing the code as we were going along. I just loved it. That was the beginning of my dual passion for geography and computers.
When I was a second year at university, I spent about six weeks producing a map of the London boroughs on a computer. It would have been much quicker to do it by hand, but we went through the effort and computerised it. There was nobody to ask for help because, at the time, there was only a small community of people attempting automated cartography. It was difficult, but I really enjoyed it. And by bringing computing into the subject, you felt you really were revolutionising the study of geography.
I’m essentially the geographer-in-residence at Google. The company is largely made up of computer scientists, and most people who work for Google have come from a programming/computer science background. My role has two parts: establishing links with the traditional geography world and showing people how important geography and map-making can be to organisations.
The last figures that we had are that 600 million people [worldwide] had downloaded Google Earth. That’s almost a third of the number of users
of the internet. It’s bigger than the population of the UK, France and Germany combined. A huge number of people. Hundreds of millions of people use Google Maps every week. Certainly, most people in the UK will have used it at some point, and they may be using it very, very regularly. It’s mainstream.
Google Earth has made the world smaller for people. When I show it to people for the first time, I always switch off the borders layer. Then they see
the world as that little blue globe the Apollo astronauts first saw in 1968, which was so important in the environmental movement. It reminds you that that’s all there is, and you’re there on that little blue planet.
We’re currently focusing on mobile applications and augmented reality. It allows you to look at the world through your phone and see what your camera is seeing but overlaid with information. So, for example, if you’re looking at St Paul’s Cathedral, it might say ‘Click here for further information’. Or if you want to find your way to the nearest tube station, we can draw an arrow on the ground that points in the right direction. We’re also experimenting with image recognition so you can take a picture of a building and we’ll look it up in our database of tens of millions of photos and instantly tell you what it is. The idea is to create an annotated world where you have information about everything you can see in front of you and, if you want to, you can dig in and find out more about it.
I think it will enhance people’s sense of discovery. You have to be quite brave to go off and explore places you’ve never been to before, and having that ‘Get me home’ button is invaluable. And I think having all this very easily accessible information will give people the confidence to visit new places.
Some countries see digital mapping as part of their national infrastructure. Places such as Singapore, Canada, Qatar, Australia and New Zealand are quite switched on. Their governments are all looking at funding both the creation and maintenance of geospatial data, and also making it as freely available as possible. At one end of the scale is the USA, where all the data is free and you can download as much as you like, but there has never been a mechanism to pay for keeping the maps up to date. As a result, the Ordnance Survey-equivalent maps in the USA are 20–30 years old. They’re almost unusable. The balance hasn’t been right. Britain is at the other extreme. OS maps are superb quality, but they are very difficult to get hold of and very expensive. [Although], at the end of last year, the prime minister said that the OS has to make some of their data more freely available so society gets the most value from it. [Before], it was like they had the best television on the street and wouldn’t
let anyone else see it.
CV
1965 Born in London
1976–82 Sir Walter St John’s School, Battersea
1983–87 BSc (Hons) in geography, Kingston Polytechnic
1990–91 MSc in applied remote sensing, Cranfield
Institute of Technology
1991–97 Senior lecturer in geographic information systems (GIS), Kingston University
1997–2001 EMEA GIS applications manager, Autodesk
2001–06 Chief technology officer, Ordnance Survey
2007–present Geospatial technologist, Google
I guess I’m an accidental geographer. I did O-level geography, which was okay, but the subject wasn’t particularly special to me. But afterwards, I went on a field trip to South Wales. Our lecturer was a hydrologist who was developing a simple computer model of groundwater hydrology. We went into the field, captured data, then came back in the evening and typed it into a computer, actually writing the code as we were going along. I just loved it. That was the beginning of my dual passion for geography and computers.
When I was a second year at university, I spent about six weeks producing a map of the London boroughs on a computer. It would have been much quicker to do it by hand, but we went through the effort and computerised it. There was nobody to ask for help because, at the time, there was only a small community of people attempting automated cartography. It was difficult, but I really enjoyed it. And by bringing computing into the subject, you felt you really were revolutionising the study of geography.
I’m essentially the geographer-in-residence at Google. The company is largely made up of computer scientists, and most people who work for Google have come from a programming/computer science background. My role has two parts: establishing links with the traditional geography world and showing people how important geography and map-making can be to organisations.
The last figures that we had are that 600 million people [worldwide] had downloaded Google Earth. That’s almost a third of the number of users
of the internet. It’s bigger than the population of the UK, France and Germany combined. A huge number of people. Hundreds of millions of people use Google Maps every week. Certainly, most people in the UK will have used it at some point, and they may be using it very, very regularly. It’s mainstream.
Google Earth has made the world smaller for people. When I show it to people for the first time, I always switch off the borders layer. Then they see
the world as that little blue globe the Apollo astronauts first saw in 1968, which was so important in the environmental movement. It reminds you that that’s all there is, and you’re there on that little blue planet.
We’re currently focusing on mobile applications and augmented reality. It allows you to look at the world through your phone and see what your camera is seeing but overlaid with information. So, for example, if you’re looking at St Paul’s Cathedral, it might say ‘Click here for further information’. Or if you want to find your way to the nearest tube station, we can draw an arrow on the ground that points in the right direction. We’re also experimenting with image recognition so you can take a picture of a building and we’ll look it up in our database of tens of millions of photos and instantly tell you what it is. The idea is to create an annotated world where you have information about everything you can see in front of you and, if you want to, you can dig in and find out more about it.
I think it will enhance people’s sense of discovery. You have to be quite brave to go off and explore places you’ve never been to before, and having that ‘Get me home’ button is invaluable. And I think having all this very easily accessible information will give people the confidence to visit new places.
Some countries see digital mapping as part of their national infrastructure. Places such as Singapore, Canada, Qatar, Australia and New Zealand are quite switched on. Their governments are all looking at funding both the creation and maintenance of geospatial data, and also making it as freely available as possible. At one end of the scale is the USA, where all the data is free and you can download as much as you like, but there has never been a mechanism to pay for keeping the maps up to date. As a result, the Ordnance Survey-equivalent maps in the USA are 20–30 years old. They’re almost unusable. The balance hasn’t been right. Britain is at the other extreme. OS maps are superb quality, but they are very difficult to get hold of and very expensive. [Although], at the end of last year, the prime minister said that the OS has to make some of their data more freely available so society gets the most value from it. [Before], it was like they had the best television on the street and wouldn’t
let anyone else see it.
CV
1965 Born in London
1976–82 Sir Walter St John’s School, Battersea
1983–87 BSc (Hons) in geography, Kingston Polytechnic
1990–91 MSc in applied remote sensing, Cranfield
Institute of Technology
1991–97 Senior lecturer in geographic information systems (GIS), Kingston University
1997–2001 EMEA GIS applications manager, Autodesk
2001–06 Chief technology officer, Ordnance Survey
2007–present Geospatial technologist, Google
