(via O’Reilly Radar)

Everyscape aims to be able to show you the whole world — both inside and out — from its website. It plans to do this with normal 2D photos. Using proprietary technology Everyscape will stitch these photos together and 3D-ify them. The result is a pan-n-scan world accessible through a Flash viewer.

When looking at their viewer you are presented with small, green arrows that direct you around their representation of the realworld. When you click one of the arrows you zoom though the 3D’d photo (a neat affect). It’s not just outside some of the arrows will take you inside buildings. Throughout the app you’ll see web links and info boxes in the form of small blue circles. You can currently check out San Francisco’s Union Square with the Everyscape
viewer.

To make their representation of the world Everyscape needs to know the lat-long and the orientation of the camera when a picture was taken. This data is used to stitch the photos together and place them in the world. The comparisons to Microsoft’s Photosynth are very obvious. The models generated by Everyscape are less CPU-internsive to generate and require less data, but are not nearly as detailed — given Everyscape’s goal I am not sure that it needs to be. (…)

Everyscape is launching with San Francisco this fall. They told me that they would have ten cities by the end of the year. On the homepage they list San Francisco, Boston, New York , and Seattle as coming soon. They claim that takes three weeks for them to record a city (the same number that MS quoted at Where 2.0) so expect the roster to expand quickly after the initial batch. (…)

Everyscape is still determining their revenue model. They can easily embed advertising and local search into their application. There may be other methods of monetizing their “eye-level search”. Real estate agents would probably love to put their houses up in a viewer like this. (…)

Update: Techcrunch has more information about the various players in this space.

What it means: I had seen the Microsoft technology last year at Mix06 and it really excited me. More players in the field means more opportunities for technology licensing (and better prices!). I think I’ve said before I’m a big believer in 3D visual city navigation. I’m convinced that it will become a new way to do local searches in the future. In the demo above, you can even enter in the Salvatore Ferragamo store!