Skip to main content

Google acquires panorama startup to give Street View a boost

google acquires panorama startup to give street view a boost digisfera
Digisfera
Google published its first Street View imagery back in 2007, giving users the chance to enjoy 360-degree views of places almost as if they were there. For the Street View team that hit the first road with the first camera-equipped car eight years ago, the idea of gathering street-level imagery for great swathes of the planet must have seemed as fanciful as it was daunting.

But progress has been swift, with the ambitious crew behind the tool also going off-road to broaden the range of its content, taking armchair travelers to locations as diverse as the top of Japan’s highest mountain to the inside of the world’s largest passenger jet.

Clearly as keen as ever to explore new ways of beefing up the service, Google has just announced it’s acquired Digisfera, a Portuguese startup that specializes in panoramic images. The value of the deal hasn’t been revealed.

Four-year-old Digisfera says its work focuses mainly on “photography, design, and development services for projects involving 360-degree images.” As noted by VentureBeat, which first reported news of Google’s latest acquisition, the startup’s past work includes huge zoomable images of President Obama’s 2013 inauguration, as well as a notable image from the Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro captured during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

The deal means Digisfera is set to discontinue its PanoTag image-tagging tool, though Marzipano, another of its offerings and one that processes and exports panoramas as 360-degree  images for viewing in a browser, will become open source in the coming weeks, move the company says it hopes will benefit the panographic photography community.

Digisfera said on its website it was “excited to join the Street View team at Google to continue building great experiences using 360-degree photography.” We’re certainly curious to see how Street View incorporates Digisfera’s technology into its 360-degree mapping tool, and hopefully won’t have to wait too long to see the early results of the Mountain View company’s most recent purchase.

Editors' Recommendations

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Google Maps’ tab for saved places gets a useful boost
4 ways 2020 has changed how i use my tech google maps in hand

The fact that more than 7 billion places globally are currently stored in Google Maps’ Saved tab tells us two things. One: There are a lot of interesting spots in the world; and two: The tab is darn popular among users.

The feature, which until February 2020 appeared in the app under the “for you” name, lets you save and manage all of the places you’re interested in, including everything from your favorite restaurants and cafes to faraway places you dream of visiting.

Read more
Google’s new Chrome add-on gives you a rundown of all the ads on a webpage
Google Logo

Nearly every website today hides underneath dozens of entities and trackers that monitor your activities in the background. Google wants to bring more transparency to the experience and it’s doing so with a new Chrome add-on appropriately called Ads Transparency Spotlight.

Ads Transparency Spotlight is part of Google’s ongoing efforts to offer more transparency into its ads platform and inform users about how their data is being targeted online. Whenever you visit a webpage, you can simply launch the extension and it will sift through it to give you a rundown of all the displayed ads and the trackers working behind-the-scenes watching your every move.

Read more
Google gives workers a chunk of cash to build a home office
hp office in a box work learn from home solutions

The coronavirus pandemic forced companies around the world to temporarily shutter their offices, forcing countless employees to work from home instead.

In the U.S., tech firms in particular appear to have embraced home working, with Twitter, for example, offering many of its employees the chance to work from home “forever,” and Facebook allowing some of its staff to work remotely until at least the end of the year.

Read more