Everyscape: A New ‘3D’ Mapping Site

Brady Forrest at O’Reilly Radar writes about a new startup, Everyscape, which is seeking to take ordinary photographs and knit them into a “3D” image display for cities. According to Forrest, the company has been around since 2002 and received funding in 2004.

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Using a mixture of proprietary technology, professionals and community the site hopes to offer photorealistic views of major U.S. cities, as well as building interiors, by this fall. The site offers a demo of the technology touring San Francisco’s Union Square.

This appears to be like a provocative marriage of Microsoft’s Photosyth with Google’s StreetView, with a little Flickr thrown in for good measure. It has the practical, 360 degree pan and zoom features of StreetView and the 2D into 3D approach of Photosynth. The reliance on community (“Scape Artists“) and geocoded images is reminiscent of Yahoo’s Flickr.

The rest of this post is at SEL. What I didn’t write about extensively in my post there was how quickly these “3D mapping” applications are now rolling out. What may emerge as “Web 3.0” is literally 3D — much more graphically rich, “immersive” environments where I can do everything from booking a hotel or making a restaurant reservation to looking at and buying a car.

And as I’ve tried to argue before, these 3D environments will be much more interesting than a “search box” and “ten blue links” as a way to discover information and conduct transactions when the Internet comes to TV in earnest via IPTV, Xbox, AppleTV and so on.

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