NAVTEQ announced yesterday that their next generation street level imagery product, JourneyView is entering a private beta program. The actual product launch is scheduled for early 2011.
The data collection system for this product includes LiDAR, panoramic cameras and GPS/IMU for positioning – in effect a mobile scanning operation. It will be interesting to see what the final product looks like.
I don’t see this opening up the mass market for laser scanning, like car navigation did for GPS, but it will certainly increase consumer awareness.
