Archive for February, 2011

Moscow in Augmented Reality

Posted in Augmented Reality, Geo, Maps, Mobile on February 28th, 2011 by andrei – Be the first to comment

Augmented reality is a trendy topic these days, and as it turns out, the trend is making its way to Russia. AR Door is the first Russian company building augmented reality applications and building up the market as a whole. The company got its start in 2009 as a development partner for Total Immersion and Layar but lately have been working on their own projects.

Their latest product is a multifunctional augmented reality guide for Moscow’s eastern administrative district. The app uses a phone’s location to pull in surrounding POI’s, photos and a ton of other information. Then, of course, the data is overlayed on a map or a “real view”. Best of all, the app supports both English and Russian languages and is available for download on the App Store (Android version is coming soon, I hear).

The original announcement is here. For other cool AR Door’s project demos watch their YouTube channel.

Russia’s AR market is still in its early stage which is pretty much true globally. Although AR applications are very cool there hasn’t been mass adoption nor even interesting business models…yet. I’m curious to see whether this will change o

Russian OSM – Stats

Posted in OSM, Russia on February 20th, 2011 by andrei – Be the first to comment

Following up on his recent interview, Maxim Dubinin (Максим Дубинин) published detailed stats for Russian OSM. As it turns out, Russian OSM community enjoys a healthy growth rate above the world’s average:

Another interesting metric is the user retention which, according to Dubinin, is as high as 83% percent! To clarify, 83% is the number of contributors who edited the map at within last 6 months. This is very impressive, I would be curious to see how this compares to Yandex People’s Map and Google’s Map Maker.

Source: Gis Lab Info

Russia’s OSM Enters Mainstream

Posted in Geo, Maps, OSM, Russia on February 10th, 2011 by andrei – Be the first to comment

This week marked a significant milestone for the Russia’s OSM – the project made its first appearance in the Russian mainstream media! OSM community members Maxim Dubinin (Максим Дубинин) and Vladimir Elistratov (Владимир Елистратов) made an appearance on a popular tech radio show Tochka.

The interview lasted over 40 minutes and revealed a ton of interesting information. Here are few points:

  • The best mapped OSM Russian city is Rybinsk
  • Russia’s OSM Community has between 4-5 thousand contributors.
  • Scanex, Rambler contributed data and hardware to the project.
  • Interesting discussion about the legality of mapping military installations.

The full transcript is available here. Something tells me that 2011 will be the year of OpenStreetMap – hope to see Russian OSM members at SOTM.