Awareness of the latest phenomenon in web based mapping, panoramic street level imagery, has been increasing recently largely due to Google’s© mapping of American, French and Australian cities in this way, what they are calling ‘Street View’. However, it is Seety who first brought this technology to the UK having previously released such imagery in Italian cities. Seety have driven over 1000 km of central London streets, taken over 170,000 photographs and individually processed each one to remove any privacy concerns such as people’s faces and vehicle number plates.

Now Seety have joined forces with one of the leading experts in interactive web based mapping, Earthware, for the first commercial implementation of the imagery. Earthware use the latest mapping technology to bring their client’s products and services to life by creating compelling visual experiences. Maps can do this, aerial and Bird’s Eye imagery can do this, but Street Level View will certainly do it! Therefore, it is of no surprise that the guys at Earthware were keen to get on board with the newest development in mapping. Earthware’s Technical Director, Brian Norman, says “Seety’s amazing Street Level View imagery has been seamlessly integrated into EarthwareProperty using Seety’s own Macromedia Flash powered panorama technology. This allows property and real estate clients anywhere in the world to license existing Seety imagery and have it added to the existing styles of maps available such as in EarthwareProperty, or they can commission new imagery”.

Street Level View will be implemented into Earthware’s exciting mapping product for the property market, EarthwareProperty, which already offers a fantastic service to the map user. Firstly, the maps integrate the clients branding and are seamlessly embedded into the client’s site via an Iframe to give the client the credit for the map, not Earthware. Then, once in place, the maps offer a clean, easy to use in-map search tool with criteria as set by the client; at a low zoom level properties are clustered together, spreading out to individual properties at higher zoom levels; hover over the property icon to view a summary of the property particulars and view local area information (schools, doctor’s surgeries etc) embedded into the map. All this is before you view the area in map, aerial, hybrid or Bird’s Eye (where it’s available) views. But we’ve already said Earthware aim to create visual experiences so experience EarthwareProperty maps for yourself in commercial property search engine, NovaLoca, the first to benefit from Earthware’s mapping. The addition of Street Level View to EarthwareProperty will add yet another piece to the jigsaw of fully experiencing a location from the PC.