<< Immersive Media Corp. announces the termination of its content license agreement with Google Inc. effective December 27, 2007. >>

Will Google expand their Street View content themselves since their deal with Immersive Media is ending soon?

http://immersivemedia.com/details.php?id=161

Hopefully. IM's data was dreadful

"Google will retain exclusive rights to content licensed to date for a period of time."

I agree, James. The Google data was much better quality.

Yeah... I reckon they just partnered with IM to get the project off the ground

Good point...Immersive came over an did a bunch of data capture for an organization I worked for and it looked awesome. Maybe they have different standards?

The California data that Google provided for Street View did look much better than the Street View data that Immersive Media provided. The Google version allowed for much more zooming capabilities.

Yes. IM's ones were just stretching the image, whilst googles ones looked like the camera zoomed in (optically) and took another picture

This is hardly surprising news, although I am sure that IM's CEO Myles McGovern has been personally trying to keep a lid on this announcement for some time. Google "dumped" IMC back in July 2007. Best guess is that Daniel Lederman and the brains at Google Earth had enough of IMC's attempted stock "pump and dump." That is, at expense of Google's good name. Only McGovern can manage to exhibt ENRON level arrogance yet still suffer from a Canadian insecurity complex. IM's camera takes video, vs. Google's referenced still shots. A video still that's been processed within an inch of it's life (no offense Ben) rather than a crisp megapixel frame.

In response to that last comment: I work for Immersive Media, and have spent a year out on the road collecting the imagery. I can't speak to the financial motives or name-calling/dropping in that post, but it doesn't seem especially fair. I'm sure Myles (or anybody at IMC) would talk to you about what you're accusing them of.

In reference to he other posters – it's true that the imagery you saw online were basically stills captured from our video footage. What you see online is a low-quality still that's been squished to fit in a panoramic format. What we're actually capturing is spherical video that allows you to look in any direction (including up and down), and really looks great, and is getting better every day. We're still out collecting in the US and Europe, so say hi to one of us if you see a silver or black beetle with a crazy camera on top.