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.

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