The geographical web is growing a little bit more today, EveryScape, which we first covered in June, is launching in Boston, New York, Miami, and Aspen. On the face of it, their service is exactly the same as Google Streetview. EveryScape has driven around each of the cities creating full 360 degree panoramas. However, there’s one key twist — anyone can contribute. Contributions will help them go beyond other services and capture indoors scenes as well. Earthmine has similar ambitions but is yet to launch. EveryScape is looking for photo contributors and “scape artists” to contribute and filter content on their maps. Paid photographic contributors take the panoramic photos, “scapes”, that serve as the canvasses for embedded information contributed by users. Contributors range from “graffiti” artists who embed new information to paid professional photographers that take panoramas. There’s also a mid-range for paid amateurs, which lets anyone with a simple digital camera and an IPIX camera kit to take photos that EveryScape can convert into 3D panoramas. Completed “scapes” look something like this hotel example. The page features a floor plan and 3D panoramas as part of a virtual tour for each room. Other users will be able to come through these “scapes” and embed more video or textual information from the web. → Read More
You’ve probably tried the “Street View” feature in Google Maps, the one in which you can actually view 3D panoramas from the street level of several cities including San Francisco, Las Vegas, Denver, Houston, and New York. Earthmine is working to bring that concept of visually mapping the real world to a deeper level by improving the quality of virtualization and by enabling the indexation of objects found in landscapes. Imagine for a second that you could notify your friends of something cool or noteworthy that you see when out on the town by simply pulling out your cellphone, bringing up a panorama of your location, and tagging something (a store, a parking spot, an historic landmark) with a note that is automatically shared with your friends. Then imagine you’re a restaurant owner who wants to entice potential customers by tagging the outside of your diner within a 3D panorama with menu information and digital coupons. None of this is possible yet, but Earthmine will provide the technology that could very well make it all a reality. Like Google, Earthmine collects its data by driving vehicles equipped with special cameras around urban areas. Earthmine co-founder John Ristevski says that the company’s custom camera “uses a stereoscopic system with extremely wide angle lenses to capture full spherical images of the urban environment.” Webware has a good photo of one of these babies strapped to the top of a Pathfinder (it can also be seen at the beginning of the video embedded below). Ristevski says that, unlike Google, Earthmine uses a data calibration process that preserves the camera input as an unfiltered data set, which contains a higher level of detail because scenes are stored in “pixel for pixel array[s] of ‘depth’ points.” The result: Earthmine panoramas look better. But they are also more useful, because more detail = better indexable data. The company is called “Earthmine” not because it wants to make Google Street View prettier, but because it wants to the “mine” the Earth’s data. What this all means is that Earthmine’s system can keep track of the objects found in the real world and attribute information to each of them (a process known as “asset mapping”). The latitude, longitude, elevation, and other attributes of garbage cans, telephone posts, manholes, and trees can be recorded and tracked in a pseudo-3D virtualization system. The information can be exploited within Earthmine’s software → Read More
San Francisco, CA
