TED 2010 took place this past weekend, February 10th through the 13th. Very few of the talks are online right now, but a number of them have already sparked conversation around the ‘net regardless. While the mosquito death laser was cool and has some awesome potential when it comes to dealing with the spread of malaria, the talk I’ve embedded above held me in its grasp much more firmly.

It’s a talk given by Blaise Aguera y Arcas (creator of Seadragon) on behalf of Microsoft. The topic is augmented reality maps. In particular, he talks about it in the context of what Bing Maps are capable of, but the topic can really be applied to any sort of virtual map. Our level of technology has reached the point where we can not only map the entire world completely with 3D rendering with enough time and effort, but we can use those maps together with still images, streaming video, and all of that sort of thing to give the big picture, so to speak. I’m sure most of us are familiar with the ‘street view’ feature on the big popular virtual maps, Bing and Google. This goes a step farther.

Watch the video, it’s right there, I don’t need to narrate the whole thing to you. So why does it excite me so much? It’s another technology that maybe isn’t incredibly useful in its infancy, but there’s significant potential there to make great things possible. Imagine the ability to truly explore far off places, despite maybe not being able to leave your bedroom.

Maybe you’re bedridden, or simply don’t have the money. When this tech is a little further along, you will essentially be able to visit landmarks and exotic places and not just see pictures, but move yourself through the environments. Imagine the ability to not just see still pictures of Paris, but be able to pick and choose which shops and restaurants you go inside and look around in. These images aren’t artistic depictions or artificial locations, they’re real pictures. On top of that, streaming video capabilities means that you could potentially be doing it live. You could go on vacation with friends and family when you otherwise wouldn’t be able to. See what they see, visit the places that they visit, and all you need is friends and an internet connection. And if you’re interested in seeing what those places look like at other times of the day, no problem, there’s endless pictures online that could be supplied to you seamlessly via these virtual maps. No need to search through flickr for hours. They’re generated for you as you want them.

Eventually, we will be able to see the four corners of the world through others’ eyes. No, you won’t really be there, but it’s pretty close and makes the world a whole lot smaller.

Another TED talk I want to mention but don’t feel like devoting an entire post to right now is George Whitesides‘ talk on affordable health care diagnostic solutions. That is, bringing the price point of diagnosing illnesses as close to $0 as possible. Some of the solutions are fascinating in their simplicity. This talk is actually from 2009 apparently, but was only posted this month. Whitesides gave another talk on simplicity in this year’s conference but that isn’t available online yet.

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