Nokia is preparing its Streetview but in 3D

The Google cars will soon no longer the only ones to take pictures of the streets of the world. Nokia will make a similar transaction with a higher technological views of fluids in three dimensions.

Nokia will soon launch in London of cars photographers, like the famous Google cars that strafed across the globe, sometimes to the chagrin of the people, as in Germany, Ireland, Japan or the Czech Republic. The Finnish mobile phone manufacturer would indeed intend to make a competing service to Streetview, providing close-up views of roads and streets. So says Ville Veikko Mattila, Nokia Research Center, the original British magazine New Scientist, after performing a demonstration at a Nokia World conference in London.

Soon?

These cars already have a name: the TrueCare and operation is based on techniques developed by Navteq, a division of the Finnish company. The process will be much more elaborate than those of Streetview, said the engineer. The result is a 3D view in which it would be possible to move continuously, as in the virtual world of video games. The system of Google, meanwhile, displays images and can only pass from one to another.

To achieve this, Navtek would use a double technical. One is to make a model of the city in three dimensions. This construction would be drawn from a database created by Navtek using lidar (laser instruments used to measure ratings in any buildings or reliefs). In a second step, a software developed by the team Mattila, plating photographs on this model.

We see that the method is cumbersome and it is unlikely that Nokia may cover towns and villages around the world, or even use bikes like Google to get photographed in rail campaigns. According to Ville-Veikko Mattila, Nokia will begin as early as November 2010 to map the streets of London and will address during the year 2011 major European cities.