At the first Longitude meetup in the U.K., organized by Ben Flanagan, Kenneth Field, and Chris Wesson, Ed Parsons presented his perspective on one of the directions to expect from geospatial in the future.  It was a bit counterintuitive, for consumers more geospatial data and technology, but fewer maps.

To start with he reminded us that the public has never had as much access to maps as we do now thanks primarily to Google Maps – either as standalone or embedded in other apps. What he foresees is that in future we will be seeing fewer maps or no maps at all.

The maps we have used up to now are large scale maps presenting a large scale view – probably very useful to Winston Churchill and people planning things on a large scale. But in our day to day life, we don’t need maps at this scale. Instead we need to know what we will encounter in the next 15 minutes, whether that be the next exit off the highway or the next grocery store. There will be more interaction between us and the world around us – for example showing which of the nearby bars or coffee shops are very busy or less busy.

Ed gave a practical example that anyone who uses a smart phone to navigate in a place they have not been before can relate to. When you come out of a tube station or any GNSS-denied place you are always faced with a quandary – how to orient yourself to know whether to walk left or right. I mentally flip a coin and walk until my smart phone tells me if I am headed in the direction I want to go. If I am in a part of the city where GNSS is unreliable I walk to the end of the block and the street number or name usually will tell me if I am headed in the right direction or that I have to retrace my steps in the other direction.  In the future your navigation app won’t rely solely on GNSS signals but will recognize buildings and give you the right direction. In fact this could all happen through an audible interface so that you needn’t look at a map at all, “turn right as you leave exit 3 from the tube station”.  Of course this will require a lot more spatial data about the city you are in and will require some serious geoanalytics.

What this suggests is that as consumers we will use more geospatial data and analytics, but it will become part of the technology stack and most of us won’t realize how much geospatial technology we are using.