FRONTIER - Maphead - page 163

could use it to interact with elaborate 3-D models that aren't really there, which would
be a boon to architects visualizing buildings and surgeons trying to practice a tricky triple
bypass without killing anyone. If you were so inclined, you could even use AR to turn
the world into your own surreal wonderland, changing the color of the sky every thirty
seconds or putting a werewolf mask or Groucho glasses on the face of every passerby, like
aMerryPranksters appforanaudience ofone.Butmostday-to-dayusesofthetechnology
will probably be locational, and that makes me wonder: can this kind of in-world navig-
ation even be called a map? It is a pictorial way to represent geography, I suppose, but
one without any significant abstraction: the map is nothing but the territory itself with very
good footnotes, a 3-D version of the Sylvie and Bruno map.
I don't think that AR wayfinding will replace maps, because I can't use it for many
thingsthatIrelyonmapsfor.It'sgoodfortellingmewhat'saroundmerightnowbutnotso
good at showing me which counties of Florida voted for Barack Obama in 2008 or wheth-
er Peru is north or south of Ecuador. I do worry that augmented reality could continue the
current trend of GPS-based mapping tools that are so convenient, so easy to use, that they
stunt our built-in spatial senses. They are, in effect, maps so good that they make us bad at
mapping.
GPS navigation is usually the whipping boy in this argument. Every driver who heads
off a cliff or onto railroad tracks just because the GPS voice told him to—and there are
thousands of these stories—is a symptom of a culture that is increasingly outsourcing its
spatial thinking to technology, and once those jobs are gone, they may not come back. My
favoritenewsstoryofGPS-crutchincompetenceisthatof anunnamedSwedishcouple try-
ingtodrivefromVenicetothesunnyisleofCapriin2009.Unfortunately,theyaccidentally
misspelled the name of their destination when they entered it into their GPS, and arrived a
fewhourslaterattheindustrialnortherntownof Carpi, wheretheywanderedintothetown
hall and asked confused officials how to get to the Blue Grotto, Capri's famous sea cave.
(The officials there assumed that “the Blue Grotto” must be some local restaurant they'd
never heard of.) Ten seconds with a map, of course, would have told these tourists that
• you can't make the four-hundred-mile drive from Venice to Capri in just two hours;
• Capri is southeast of Venice, not west;
• and, crucially, that it's a small island, and the couple hadn't crossed a bridge or used
a boat to get to Carpi, which is located on a landlocked inland plain!
But they didn't look at a map. They trusted GPS.
The decline of our wayfinding abilities didn't begin with GPS, of course. Nomadic cul-
tures like the Bedouins still use all kinds of natural wayfinding cues in the stars and camel
tracks that a modern American would never see because we've been able to rely on roads
and signs and so forth in our cozy urban lives. Many human skills ceded to technology
are no great loss—I'm not as good as my ancestors were at telling time based on the pos-