3-D Mapping News: Everyscape and TeleAtlas

3-D mapping company EveryScape has secured a $7 million B round led by Waltham, Massachusetts-based Dace Ventures. Similar to Google’s Street View, the company stitches together 3-D renderings of street-level cityscapes. Unlike Google or any other mapping provider, however, EveryScape also creates 3-D renderings of some building interiors (see past write-up).

The company hopes this will create a unique user experience and an advertising opportunity within some verticals conducive to checking out a space before visiting (think restaurants and hotels). The same can be said for SMB video advertising, gaining popularity among many SMBs in the restaurant vertical. The challenge for Everyscape will be in selling to SMBs.

Overall, 3-D mapping has potential to add a dimension (literally) to online mapping, to broaden its use cases and ad inventory. Google’s head of Maps and Local, John Hanke, touched on some of these possibilities at ILM:07 in November, and others have been covered in past posts.

Everyscape currently has Boston, Aspen, Miami and New York covered, and funding will enable the time-consuming and costly process of obtaining digital imagery for additional cities. It will also grow its sales force.

TeleAtlas: Plotting the Course

Speaking of obtaining 3-D imagery, over the weekend I got a glimpse at some of the SUVs that mapping data provider TeleAtlas has dispatched to take pictures of roadsides across the country. These images will be used with geometric modeling to create 3-D mockups of roads and cityscapes (similar to what Microsoft has done with Virtual Earth 3-D).

Here is a video (scroll) from The Wall Street Journal that shows what the company is trying to do, and below are a few snapshots I was able to take in San Francisco of one of the vehicles. (Incidentally, check out the quality pics the iPhone is able to take.)