A Look at ImmersiveMedia's Tech

Popular Mechanics has a great article on ImmersiveMedia, Google‘s Streetview (Radar post) content partner at launch. They dive into the technology, the process, and their future plans.

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Immersive has posted footage taken during the writing of the article. The demo is interactive and you can control your view as the video progresses. This is possible via its camera, ImmersiveMedia’s key contribution to the partnership (seen above):

At the heart of Immersive’s services for Google and a number of other contractors is the Dodeca 2360, a softball-size camera that records from nearly a dozen different angles at 30 frames per second. Later, photos can be extracted and stitched together to form pictures with a resolution of 2400 by 1200 pixel—a frame “bigger than any high-definition image,” says its inventor and chief technology officer, David McCutchen.

But at $45,000 for the camera, twice that with mounts and a base unit that processes images in real time, plus anywhere from $125 to $700 per mile of video footage, the rig doesn’t come cheap. That’s probably why just six two-man teams make up Immersive’s geodata services, using an off-the-shelf Logitech video-game controller to operate the camera, which is mounted above each VW—not that they haven’t hoisted it on backpacks for shots of the Grand Canyon and the Everglades.

My only problem with the article is that ImmersiveMedia recently announced the end of its partnership with Google effective December 27, 2007 (pdf). Popular Mechanics never mentions this and includes a quote from a Google spokesperson. I’ve sent a mail into ImmersiveMedia to get clarification on their partnership.

Apparently Google will have exclusive access to the currently licensed ImmersiveMedia content for a period of time. My money is that Google is building out its own fleet of mapping vehicles. At launch Google captured San Francisco footage on its own and they are now ready to map more cities. Besides getting data for Streetview, what other types of data are they captuing?

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