Earthmine was one of the more interesting exhibitors at last year’s SPAR Conference in Denver. I visited with the company last year and ran into the company founder Anthony Fassero at this year’s event. They didn’t have a visible presence this year because Fassero indicated that they’re just too busy.
They have 10 vehicles now in rotation collecting data worldwide, and Fassero said that they’re busy on a major data collection project in France. The big push is for pixel-based collection of urban environments, with each pixel having an accuracy of less than one meter.
I ran into a Twitter post by Tim O’Reilly that pointed me to this blog post with the following embedded video that shows a very exciting view of future pedestrian navigation (including x-ray vision) that uses Earthmine data for visual search along with mobile video as the sensor. This amazing augmented reality application uses Earthmine’s photo point clouds to solve the major problem of data collection.
Earthmine has expanded their business model to include hosting their own data in the cloud, and providing developer tools so that other companies can create interesting applications. The above example was developed by a company named Occipital using Earthmine data and their development tools.
It’s great to see this exciting use of Earthmine data, and to speculate about future applications that this quality data enables. The utility of the photo point cloud starts to make great sense, particularly in the mobile environment, because there are far fewer points than LIDAR for a more compressed data set. The full 3D view is captured with good textures and realism to neatly represent the world around you.
I can’t wait to hear more about what the company has been up to. Fassero indicated that they’re staying rather quiet right now, but that we’ll hear more from them in the June time frame with a France-oriented announcement.
