With the dominance of the cellphone, the map is emerging as a new metaphor for how we organize, find and use information.

A new generation of smartphones like Google’s Android G1 and a range of Japanese phones now “augment” reality by painting a map over a phone-screen image of the user’s surroundings produced by the phone’s camera.

With this sort of map it is possible to see a 3-D view of one’s surroundings, including the annotated distance to objects that may be obscured by buildings in the foreground. 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.