Just Around The Corner: The First 3D Map

By: Kermit PattisonTue May 27, 2008 at 9:45 PM

Fast Interview: Earthmine co-founder John Ristevski talks about competing with Google and the first consumer applications for this space-age technology.

John Ristevski, Earthmine

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Describe how you gather these images.

We route the vehicle through every single street that’s accessible by the vehicle -- literally down every alley. It sounds like it would be incredibly slow, but because we can collect at regular driving speed, it’s actually reasonably fast. For one vehicle to collect the whole of San Francisco, every street and every alley, is about two weeks of driving. We think of the Earthmine vehicles as web crawlers for the real world. They’re going around and capturing the analog environment and turning it into digital database.

What’s the funniest thing you’ve found when you looked at the images?

I can tell you one funny story, which is very particular to this type of work. You can imagine people sharing illegal cable setups where they hang lines across the road. The Earthmine camera sits fairly high and when people hang lines across the road that sit a little too low, interesting things can happen.

You took out someone’s pirate TV cable?

Comcast should be paying us a commission for clearing all the illegal cable setups throughout San Francisco.

So far you’ve done San Francisco and a smattering of West Coast cities. How big an area would you like to do?

Our goal is to get to 50 major metropolitan areas in the next 18 to 24 months. We think that’s when it becomes interesting as a consumer platform.

What sort of commercial applications do you foresee?

If you have a 3D model of a building that you’re proposing, you could actually insert that into our scene and visualize it against the existing urban fabric. It’s something the city could evaluate to understand how your design fits in. In terms of construction, there are a number of ways you could use this information, mostly for reconnaissance. You could measure heights of buildings next to the lot, understand the types of buildings around the scene, understand the scale, measure the width of the lot, measure the offset from the street front, even the grade—basically everything until you get a survey crew on site. That’s something you can’t really do from a photo.

How about consumer applications?

The Earthmine system is really lightweight in terms of bandwidth and can be delivered easily over a mobile connection. You have your car navigation system that helps you get from A to B, but what happens when you actually get there? We think that the pedestrian navigation problem is a really exciting area that no one has solved. We’re seeing a lot of interest from potential partners and potential customers for that type of application. With the types of capabilities you have on cell phones, including GPS, accelerometers and digital compasses, the devices themselves are really primed to help you solve that pedestrian navigation problem. They just need that base layer of information to support these services.

Instead of giving me directions to a restaurant, you can literally show me how to get there by sending images to my mobile device?

I think you’ll see applications like that sooner rather than later. It’s just around the corner.