Video BlackBerry 10 Cascades Reality 2D-3D MapView

RIM continues to guide & produce developers with more core accessible functions. The latest code dropped yesterday is the Cascades powered MapView which devs can load up into their app for easy yet beautiful map integration. This MapView sample app has some pretty neat features apart from accuracy. The augmented enabled view is the thing & reminds of something extraordinary.

If you remember, a Sweden based user interface company The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) was acquired by RIM back in 2010. This company, now known as RIM Sweden, built the awesome UI we see on BlackBerry 10. Before joining RIM, TAT showed their impressive skills & one of them was the augmented reality connected Horizon 2D-3D Map. Below is it’s demo video & you will understand what I’m hoping/talking about. Can’t wait for BlackBerry 10 Maps

RIM describes this new development feature:

MapView provides out of the box elegance with beautiful map tiles and all the basic interactions such as pinch-to-zoom and drag-n-pan. You can also drop push pins for POIs and show bubbles to present more details about a POI. Better yet, both the pin and the bubble can be fully customized to represent your own branding. Although these cover the basic needs for most of us, anything with Cascades has to be a bit more special, right? So where is the moment of charm in MapView? You just have to continue reading (or watch the video above).

I know 2D maps are nice and they do their job, but they are also yesterday’s news. The MapView takes that to the next level with APIs for tilting and rotating the map in a 3D space. Hook those two up with the gyroscope and the compass and you’ve got augmented reality in your app with zero effort. In fact, that’s exactly what I did in the CustomMapView sample app. The sample demonstrates the full power of MapView as of today and will be kept up to date as we add more features to our SDK. Please feel free to fork this in GitHub and contribute back!

Check out the video on MapView below: