Cellphones and mapping

Just read a good article in the New York Times about the future of maps and cells phones.
The Cellphone, Navigating our Lives

It raises the issue of what could be a very dramatic change for human behaviour. How soon before our cellphones become interfaces with the real world, much like videogame displays?

For starters, map-based cellphones simply translate paper maps into a digital medium, but future systems will probably begin to blur the boundaries between the display and the real world.

“I always said the next interface would be Quake,” said Steve Capps, one of the designers of the original Macintosh interface, referring to the popular video game. “How long will it be before you come out of the subway and you hold up your screen to get a better view of what you’re looking at in the physical world?”

And will this have a deeper, biological, and even evolutionary change? Will our cellphones become so much a part of how we get from point A to point B, that the phones take on a symbiotic relationship with us, and in turn cost us our internal navigational instincts?

The map interface even seems to have a biological basis, as suggested by new brain studies showing how the world is represented in brain maps.

“Humans evolved with amazing navigational abilities in our brains from an evolutionary perspective,” said Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive. He argues that the correlation between the map on the phone and the internal map in your head is a natural way to navigate all kinds of information.

For example, neuroscientists have discovered that people who have occupations that require them to maintain complex mental maps of the world, like London taxi drivers, have an enlarged hippocampus. What happens when our hand-held computers become extensions of the way we think?

“I have wondered about the fact that we might as a culture lose the skill of mapping our environment, relying on the Web to tell us how to navigate,” said Hugo Spiers, a neurobiologist at University College London. “Thus, it might reduce the growth of cells in the hippocampus, which we think stores our internal maps.”