Google acquired 360-degree photography startup Digisfera, with the company’s engineers to work on Street View.
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Portugal-based Digisfera was founded in January 2011 with an aim to offer 360-degree photography experience on new projects. The company confirmed the deal to the tech site Venture Beat without disclosing any specifics. For the Street View team that hit the first road with the first camera-equipped auto 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. Initially just launched in a few cities of the United States, the service now covers a wide range of locations as diverse as highest mountain of Japan to the insides of the largest passenger jet in the world.
Google has acquired 360-degree photography startup Digisfera in a move created to boost the picture-taking abilities of the Street View service. The company has covered USA president Obama’s Inauguration Ceremony, 2014 winter Olympics in Russian Federation, and the 2014 world cup in Brazil to name a few.
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Google is expected to take Digisfera’s in-house development talent and focus it on building out the capabilities of Street View by injecting more imaging options into the interactive mapping service. The company specializes in photography, designing and developing services for the events and projects involving 360 degree panoramic images, and has been part of a few prominent projects over the period of five years. The start-up said that “no new customers will be accepted” on its system, although PanoTag servers will remain available for existing customers until 31 October. The viewer works as a 360-degree media tool and allows users to generate a virtual tours via a set of panoramas, and export the same as a web application. These skills are going to hopefully translate to making Street View a better product and it wouldn’t be far-fetched to think that Digisfera could contribute to Cardboard technology as well.
