Roadworks help mainstreet and town centre groups find their place on the web. Most sites, such as Ponsonby Road feature Streetscroll. This allows users to take a virtual walk along the street, with business info displayed on mouse-over. Interestingly, these sites have been around since 2000!

The company is currently working on version 3 of its community model, due for release later in 2007. Among other modifications, this will incorporate geocoding of locations, linked to business listings, etc.

The imagery is pretty good. Certainly better than A9’s effort and presumably created for less than the billions mentioned above!

Using EyeStride anyone with a digital camera can create a “tour” that anchors images to a Google Map or any user contributed map (any image can be used as a map and layered among Google maps). For example we’ve created tours of homes that start on a Google Map and then move through different levels of a house using floorplans as a navigational guide.

Sometime next week we’re going to launch the first samples of our street level tour experience and in a month or two we’re launching a limited alpha of the full “create-upload-explore” solution. You can sign up on the site

Check out our site and feel free to contact me michael {at} eyestride.com

=)

Your start-up sounds pretty cool GL, shoot me an email (link in name) when you need beta testers.

So, France Telecom uses MappyPro Visiocity, a software that precisely creates a database of all streets and buildings of a city with photo archives per address, with zoom and pano “a la” Quicktime VR. The company that created that software is Mappy SA, 47 rue de Charonne (75011 Paris – France). If anyone is interested (Allo, Google?…) you can contact Mrs. Virginie Tauzin in France at +1 4807 5851. I have nothing to do with them, but I hope this helps.

By the way, today starts the “Virtual Worlds 2007″ conference in NY, the first major one to specifically promote marketing in virtual worlds to Fortune 500 companies (http://www.virt...lworlds2007.com). I wish I had time to attend, but there’s too much for me in LA right now

Nice work on asking them for your file!!! Check mate! Keep us posted if you have any response!!!

Or maybe they’d be sitting in their offices right now ‘creating’ seemingly unsanitized dossiers for Om Malik, Robert Scoble, etc. I wouldn’t be surprised if they threw in a bunch of interns to go about fulfilling a fake act in ‘Radical transparency’

I thought Visiocity was built by the French Yellow Pages, not La Poste. Am I wrong?

Odd enough, I am about to give you guys the possibility to build all the shops, restaurants, offices, etc you have in your street with an open source set of tools and the sources for tens of 3D spaces like shops, offices, restauraunts, sports venues, theaters, including a complete Las Vegas in 3D. It’s gonna be the 3D-pedia we all dreamt about. Geeks will be able to make money building 3D stuff for others, while Dummies will simply pick the 3D model that best represents the shape of their room (apartment, shop, office, restaurant, etc) and upload the pictures they took from their own walls.

As I was teaching that 3D technology at the UCLA Virtual Lab with Professor Bernie Frisher back in 2001 I nurtured the goal of putting together the French Post Office concept with my 3D realizations, so that you can not only zoom from space with Google Earth (or Microsoft Earth) to ground level and immerse yourself at the street level with a system like the French PO or Vutool, but you can click on the shop or building you see at the street level and enter the virtual building or shop in 3D, recreated with the wall textures/pix people would upload along with over 2,000 free 3D objects in stock (this is no Second Life).

The great thing with our techno is that the client is just 1 MB (compare with SL, Kaneva, Blaxxum, etc…), has all the dev tools ready and tens of 3D models to start from to build the grid in true open source.

There is everything one can dream about with a 3D environment: webcam and audio chat directly in 3D (see you, SL…), yes the avatars speak live “a la” Skype and you can put the live webcam stream onto your avatar’s head. Live video can be projected on any surface or 3D object, objects and textures can be added or edited on the fly directly and live from your 3D world, etc, etc. And it works great even for people with just a modem, which truly opens the way to a real Wikipedia-like 3D project where developing countries can participate even if their installed base of PC’s is quite old (PIII, etc).

The Second Life is great for having evangelized the Internet 3D in the last 12 months (since they’ve got plenty of cash) but it just copycats what the French studio Canal Plus did in 1997 with this technology (Le Deuxieme Monde, a complete Paris in 3D where people could just do what SL did five years after).

Yes, we are in stealth mode, beta etc, although this post will probably lift the veil a little on what’s “cooking” here.

– I wonder if their is a business model besides “sell to bigger company” ..

– Rb

–Then again if it works…

I agree with the poster who said the best way to make a true visual map at street level would be wiki style, where folks can upload their own photos.

http://www.tekn...ld.blogspot.com

We’re getting information about a new stealth startup called Vutool. The founder is Sebastian Thrun, Director of the Stanford AI Lab. We hear that he has a team of ten or so people, most of them Stanford Ph.D. students….

You could say that Chris. Usually though they launch before they get bought. Or at least put up a landing page.