Earthware Blog

Google has announced the launch of the Google Tricycle. As the Google Street cars whiz through the larger roads of cities and towns around the world capturing 360 degree images of the area, there are some places they just can’t reach. This is where the Google Tricycle will come in handy: it can fit down those smaller streets around the towns and can even take Street View off-road!

Google launched their Street View imagery in the UK in March 2009 amid a storm of controversy. However, they were not the first. Earthware introduced the first customised Street Level View four months earlier in November 2008 for commercial property listings website, Novaloca.com.

One critisim of the Google Street View offering was it’s lack of coverage of minor roads. The Google trike will aim to solve this. It is currently being tested in Genoa and is expected to hit the UK shores this summer. In partnership with Visit Britain, the public will be able to vote for three landmarks they would like to see captured.  Justin Reid of Visit Britain said, “the new trike will enable us to showcase even more of Britain’s wonderful destinations and we look forward to receiving some great ideas from the public”.

The images taken by the trike will be stitched together to form a 360 tour of the location and be embedded in the existing Google Maps.

However, the Google trike is not the only technology available to develop this sort of imagery. With Microsoft’s Photosynth technology you can turn your digital images of a route, location or object into a 3 dimensional, navigatable image. Alternatively, Seety, the company behind the Street Level View imagery Earthware embedded in NovaLoca.com are offering their services for bespoke work. So if you can’t wait for the Google trike to make it to your favourite location there are a number of other options open to you.

If you could like to hear more about how Google Maps or Microsoft Virtual Earth can help your business then contact Earthware.

Having released Photosynth for commercial use Microsoft  have now announced their commercial terms making it clear how this technology can be used.

Using Photosynth

As long as the synths embedded in a website comply with the terms of use, are publicly available and use under 20GB of storage they are free. If you want to make your synths private (not listed on the photosynth website) you can ‘unlist’ them but this comes with some restrictions. Unlisted synths are limited to 1GB of storage (it is 20GB for public synths) and synth views (when a view opens a synth) are limited to 500 per month. If the way you use photosynth exceeds or is likely to exceed these limits you will need a photosynth commercial license.

Benefits of a commercial License

• All the benefits of unlisted synths (not listed on the photosynth website or indexed by search engines)
• Unlimited synth storage
• Unlimited synth views

Synth views are counted as Microsoft Virtual Earth billable transactions. Microsoft track how many synth views are used and charge accordingly.

Photosynth has many applications in the commercial market. For example, Earthware client London Property specialists Residential Land are using it in the Virtual Earth property maps to give internal tours of their available properties.

Happy synthing!

Microsoft has just announced the release of the latest updates to their Photosynth technology, which through an integration with Microsoft Virtual Earth means that the technology can now be used commercially.

What is Photosynth?

Photosynth ‘stitches’ together digital photos of any object or location giving the user a 3D, 360-degree, interactive experience of the space. You can navigate around the ‘synth’ to view the object or location from all angles (according to the number and position of the original photos) and zoom in to the images to see the detail.

What has been added to Photosynth?

The latest release of Photosynth introduces:

· Commercial licensing – businesses can now use the technology to give their customers an exciting new way to explore and interact with their products, whether that be a hotel room or a car

· Privacy controls – users can now choose how they share the synths by making them public or unlisted on http://www.photosynth.net

· One click highlighting – makes navigating through the synths much easier

What have Earthware been doing with Photosynth?

At Earthware we have been playing with photosynth for a while now, and with Microsoft’s latest updates we have now made live our new property photosynths map using Virtual Earth in London property consultants Residential Land displaying three of their properties using this new technology.

Residential Land users are used to seeing the great Aerial and Birds Eye imagery of property that is available with the Earthware Property interactive maps already available on the site, but now with the Photosynth map they can also see the inside of the properties. They can ‘walk’ around the space to discover how the rooms flow together and even zoom in to see what the cupboard door handles in the kitchen are like. Buyers/renters are able to see the property inside and out without actually needing to go there, opening up more properties to them and therefore increasing Residential Lands rental and sales figures.

View the photosynth map to see exactly how Residential Land are using photosynth and contact Earthware to find out how you could be using it too.

Using the latest technology from Microsoft we can plot live written information on a map. I expect you have now at least by now heard of Twitter. At the recent G20 protests in London, many people were communicating with each other via Twitter to share things such as which roads were open, where not to venture and even the location of public toilets.

We have been working on a demo which uses Microsoft’s latest mapping technology to integrate mapping with twitter to allow people to tweet their message and location and plot these on a map to show thoughts and details on a specific topic/event, for an international company, or for global issues. Here is a demo app we created that was used by Microsoft in the launch event for their new mapping product. It shows you the kind of things you can do with animation and mapping.

Contact Earthware for more information about social media mapping.

This isn’t the end of our playing and development, there are a couple more ways that we can help you can to use visual media to market your services on the way but these are still hush hush. Watch this space as we will be announcing them in the coming weeks.

Any of the concepts which I have introduced over the past few days can be used in combination with each other to generate a very rich interactive experience. For more information about social media mapping or any of our other marketing tools contact Earthware.

Last October we worked with an imagery partner to release Street Level View imagery of London in one of our client’s sites, Novaloca.com five months before Google launched Street View.

Our partner will take the pictures for a small area, route or for a whole city as is requested. They will edit them for privacy concerns and then we can add them to our interactive maps adding a new visual representation of a location. The images can be taken before an event to show the route/area or can be taken as the event is taking place to allow the participants to see themselves. The images can be embedded into maps along with local area information and important landmarks for the user to navigate through, or we can create a video of it.

View central London in Street Level View for an example of the imagery.

Read more about Street Level View or for more information contact Earthware.

Tomorrow… Social Media Mapping