For me, this is fulfillment of a dream. I attended one of the first big municipal GIS conferences in San Antonio in 1992. During one of the “blue sky” workshops to imagine what we wanted, they were talking about how you would bring up the map of your choice - type in a section-number, or a neighbourhood name, or what. Continuous map databases were just starting to be developed, mostly you had to load in files of small areas. The notion of a master-map at low detail, where you’d click on an area to get that map, was popular.
I got a round of applause for saying that what you wanted was to lift your laptop up to the job site and just see the pipes beneath your feet, as if it were a “magic window”. (The term “AR” did not exist, though “VR” was already a popular dream.) This was hopelessly advanced in 1992 - nobody at the conference had a colour laptop, for instance. The mapping programs could only run at all on the fastest laptops, the ones that could run a Pentium. And it took a minute to load the mapping program and another to load in a square mile’s worth of, say, water map. Another minute if you also wanted the sewers, and so on.
And now, we’ve finally gotten there. Only 26 years!
Frankly, field usage of GIS never really got going with laptops, even. They really preferred paper right up into the 21st century, because of boot-up times, difficulty seeing the display in the sun, lack of computer expertise when it glitched. Mostly, the mapping computers were kept in the trailer, not actually used outdoors. It’s starting to happen now with phones, these are finally light and rugged enough for the crews.
There’s some of my water-system GIS maps at http://brander.ca , but alas, not as exciting as AR. Mostly, GIS maps are used for planning, designe and job-management; in the field, you are mostly done when you know where (and where not) to dig.
