Cool Service But….
April 10, 2007 by Mark Evans
Filed under Business
Here’s a cool service: Virtual City that uses Google Maps and photographs to provide you with the ability to check out addresses throughout Toronto. It’s pretty cool being able to see a photograph of your house but I wonder about the usefulness of the service beyond the initial novelty factor. I guess it could be become a very interesting tool for people looking to buy a house because you could get a quick sense of what a house looks like, and what other houses on street look like as well. I’m particularly curious about how VirtualCity collects its photographs. On the Web site, it talks about using “mobile communication centers equipped with high-definition video cameras and the latest in global positioning technology”. The Toronto-basec company plans to take millions of photographs of each city it plans to cover.
I can see usefulness for the cities themselves. They have to take pictures of every building for their records and their home evaluation (for the taxes). It could save them a tremendous amount of work if they could link the pictures to the adresses. A nice improve in that case would require some artificial vision and maybe an actuated camera, to better fit the buildings in the pictures.
As you metion, it could be nice to integrate to real estate websites. The surroundings of a home are really important for the buyers.
For the technology used, maybe it’s not that high tech. It might just be a match between the time clock in the camera and in the GPS. It is widely used by amateurs to geotag their pictures as I mentionned here: http://www.lablogatoire.com/2007/03/29/comment-geo-positionner-des-photos/
It isn’t that high tech. They use a car with a video camera mounted on top and map the location to the video feed with GPS.