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Apple acquired mind-blowing 3D mapping company C3 Technologies
- zobzu 15y agohad to add "mind blowing " or it wouldnt be worth it uh
- kristopolous 15y agocliche headlines make me want to run too ... I despise them.
- myspy 15y agowow, that looks cool. But the whole world has to be 3D, wanna see the Himalaya and rain forests and my home town in 3D :-D
- buro9 15y agoI currently work for Yell Labs in the UK (though quit last week to fully commit to the startup I'm working on with 2 other great guys), and we use C3 on the maps part of the main website. If you want to see what it looks like, try this: http://www.yell.com/map/ http://www.yell.com/map/ Only a few locations in the UK were commissioned... the cost is high so we aimed at the large cities to start with. It's really good stuff so long as you stay away from trees that are near buildings ;) The dataset is enormous though. Going to be interesting to see that go mobile. C3 basically took a FPS game map approach (poly data and textures) and overlaid that with a tiled map approach. So each tile downloads the poly and then lays the texture for that tile over the poly.
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- namityadav 15y agoMy question to you, sir, is how did you manage to get such a domain name for a seemingly bootstrapped company? Kudos!
- AlecSchueler 15y agoIt's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yell_Group http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yell_Group
- wgx 15y agoAmusing indictment of the UK's longest-established [1] directory service that they look "seemingly bootstrapped" at a glance. [1] Yellow Pages started 1954 in the UK
- buro9 15y agoIt's even older, it belonged to the GPO (General Post Office) before that, which is why it is yellow... the post office was yellow before it obtained the royal charter, renamed and rebranded.
- buro9 15y agoI think you got confused... I currently work for Yell (multi-national, been around for ever). But, I have been working on a startup in my spare time for which I've now (as of last week) quit my day job to fully commit to. The startup has no money and will be the definition of frugal until we turn profit, Yell has less (they may make tons from sales and be profitable quarter to quarter, but they're saddled with amazing levels of debt).
- jabkobob 15y agoThis is truly mindblowing. But apart from the obviously neat 3D effect, this is the first time I see aerial photos that look beautiful. Those you find on Bing and Google often suffer from ugly colors.
- elliottcarlson 15y agoThe trees definitely do distort certain features though - one good example is the tree lined sidewalk next to Buckingham Palace - when viewing in a top down view and then tilting the camera, you can see how the technology assumes the content under the trees (the sidewalk) would be the same outline as the top down view of the trees that are hanging over the sidewalk. This causes an interesting warp on the rendered view. It's interesting how realistic everything looks until it reaches that issue. Still a very nice example of the technology in use.
- martinkallstrom 15y agoThe company is headquartered where I live, Linköping in Sweden with 150 000 people. They were spun off from fighter plane manufacturer Saab Aerospace which is also situated in Linköping. Saab owned 53% of the company and Apple paid around $250 millon. EDIT: Here is a video from Saab showing the process of acquiring map data and it's military applications: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNemPTHOKWg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNemPTHOKWg
- erikstarck 15y agoThat must be why the second video is of "Oslo, Sweden". :) Tjena, Martin, förresten. :)
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- martinkallstrom 15y agoHallå Erik!
- kiiski 15y agoAt least it says below it: "A fly-through over Oslo, Norway created by C3 Technologies".
- JfromSw 15y agoI also figured that :) Kul att se fler Svenskar på HN!
- clistctrl 15y agoThat video, and the demo from the link above is amazing! The speed of progress is blowing my mind, especially in the area of image recognition, and analysis. Though there's incredible progress in AI, wireless technology, and virtually everything else. Everywhere I look engineers and scientists are pulling off mind blowing things. I'm going into the future expecting the unreal, yet still when I see it I feel like i'm experiencing future shock.
- pyrtsa 15y agoInteresting. Previously, the same company has been behind the 3D view of Nokia's map service http://maps.nokia.com/3D/ http://maps.nokia.com/3D/ — more info e.g. here http://www.ubergizmo.com/2011/04/c3-technologies-behind-nokias-ovi-maps-3d/ http://www.ubergizmo.com/2011/04/c3-technologies-behind-noki...
- devtesla 15y agoAnd still no turn by turn directions :p
- georgemcbay 15y agoThis is actually a fairly serious issue for all non-Android handsets, IMO. The built-in integrated-into-almost-everything Google Nav functionality is the killer feature that trumps all other killer features in phones for me. Obviously YMMV and for some people this feature isn't as big a deal, but it is a huge deal for me and it is what stops me from seriously considering anything that isn't an Android phone these days. For the record, I do realize there are quite a few GPS turn by turn solutions for the iPhone, but suggesting they are a true replacement for Google's Nav stuff is like suggesting Google Voice Search is a replacement for Siri.
- felipemnoa 15y agoI use Tom-Tom in the iPhone and it is good. The most incredible thing is that if I make a wrong turn it recalculates new directions. I knew this existed in classic GPS devices but never realized how useful it was until I actually used it. Plus it does not require a signal which is actually really useful when you travel to Canada (from the USA) where you cannot use the local telephone service unless you are ready to pay a lot of money. I think iPhone with Tom-Tom is fine. It costs $60 dollars but you can share it with 4 other devices which means you can spread the cost.
- jonknee 15y ago> The most incredible thing is that if I make a wrong turn it recalculates new directions I have never used turn-by-turn navigation that couldn't do this.
- georgemcbay 15y agoYou just did that thing which I tried to prevent anyone from doing with my last paragraph. Sorry but the GPS solutions on the iPhone just aren't the same (btw, direction recalculation is a no brainer and of course Google Nav does that, and a whole lot more like local data polling from other Google Nav users to determine realtime road speeds for path redirection) Anyway, it is the full OS integration that is key. Basically anything on the phone that displays an address (web browser, Google Maps, apps like Yelp, etc) displays it as a clickable link letting me instantly pull up directions and switch into nav mode. This sort of integration is huge but sadly the sort of thing people tend to gloss over unless they've actually experienced it, which is why I tried to preempt that with the (also flawed) comparison between Google Voice Search and Siri.
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- Geee 15y agoHow is it different from this? WebGL 3D maps. http://maps3d.svc.nokia.com/webgl/ http://maps3d.svc.nokia.com/webgl/ Edit: Of course they will do it Apple way, which means excellent execution and integration.
- dmix 15y agoMy first thought after seeing the videos is how this will apply to video games. It seems like a relatively easy way to replicate the real world into a game map.
- gacek 15y agoReminds me of http://hitta.se/3d http://hitta.se/3d - zoom to Stockholm. [edit: its their work as well]
- frooxie 15y agoYeah, I was wondering if this was the same technology that hitta.se has been using for years.
- yellowbkpk 15y agoI remember these guys being at Where 2.0 a few years ago. They were not hiding their desire to be acquired very well at that point: they were almost begging to get every Google employee present into their exhibit booth. Interesting to see they finally got a bite from Apple.