A very interesting read. The article focuses on a company named Tele Atlas.
Meet the people at Tele Atlas, the company that provides so-called “base maps” to such high-profile clients as Google, MapQuest and RIM, the maker of the BlackBerry. Tele Atlas also provides digital-mapping services for its corporate owner, the portable-navigation company TomTom.
It goes on…
Images collected by the vans’ cameras don’t make it to the public because Tele Atlas doesn’t have an application like Google Street View. But it soon may have something that’s arguably even better.
That brings us to the vans’ side-sweeping lasers. As the vans drive, their lasers constantly scan the road and everything around it, recording information that Tele Atlas calls the “first reflective surface.” This includes the width, height and contours of every building the van passes.
This data, when combined with the images captured by the cameras, will help Tele Atlas create a 3-D world.
Three-dimensional digital maps already are common in Japan and Western Europe. But 3-D maps are still in their primitive stages in the U.S., where their quality depends on the type of device they’re displayed on.
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Within 18 months, Tele Atlas hopes to develop a powerful navigation system whose images will look almost identical to the surroundings through which we travel.
Source: CNN
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