Taqtile brings 3D maps to the HoloLens (video)

Tactile has shown off a new app for the HoloLens which brings interactive and collaborative 3D maps to the platform.

The app uses Bing data and renders cityscapes, forests and other areas in interactive 3D, allowing multiple people to view the data at the same time. A variety of data can be laid over the 3D maps including traffic conditions, location-tagged tweets and weather forecasts for the areas displayed on the map. Users can also draw and write notes on maps that can be saved for later use. Businesses can bring in their own information and Taqtile will work with them to integrate it into maps.

“The concept for this whole platform is to make it very easy for customers to bring in whatever sort of data sources they want to overlay on top of this,” said Dirck Schou, co-founder of Taqtile.

“The list of different things you can integrate is somewhat endless,” said Kelly Malone, the company’s vice president of product management who spent more than 10 years at Microsoft.

Taqtile’s first maps customer was the PGA Tour, which lets users interact with 3D models of different holes overlaid with a bevy of statistics. The company is also building a HoloLens app for Real Madrid and is in active discussions with a number of sports teams to use the app to display stadium remodel plans for the public and also use it as a sales tool for potential sponsors.

Besides the HoloLens the service will also work with the HTC Vive in its commercial version, where images can be rendered at higher quality due to the increased resources available on the tethered PC.

“This is a V1 device, what you are seeing is V1, and it’s able to do this, imagine what the next version is going to be,” Malone said. “It’s probably going to be lighter, smaller, and it’s probably going to actually be much higher quality.”

See the app in action below:

Read more about the service at Taqtile here.