Applications of GIS
As Richie Carmichael of the Esri Applications Prototype Lab said to Keith Mann in an online article (http://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0311/augmented-reality-and-gis.html):
“Imagine that you could point the camera on your phone at the ground and see the location and orientation of water pipes and electric cables buried under the ground because your AR app is cross-referencing the GIS system with your location and giving you a kind of x-ray vision so that you can visualize the infrastructure that is underneath you.”
This mindset has been reflected by many companies such as Google, Tencent, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and many more. China’s Tencent has done quite a few things with augmented reality and GIS. I think it is very worthwhile to go over some of the things China have done with AR and GIS.
China does not use Google’s services whatsoever and had to create their own search engine, which is called Baidu. This also means that they had to make mapping software...