Tele Atlas drives 3-D road map development

Is a picture really worth more than a thousand words? A Dutch company believes so.

Tele Atlas NV is amassing data for 3-D views of roads and their surroundings to be featured in a new generation of satellite navigation systems that could give voice-centric devices a run for their money. The company is venturing into 3-D digital navigation maps in a move to expand beyond providing data for the highly competitive market for 2-D maps.

Tele Atlas has sent off a fleet of 22 orange-colored camper vans equipped with cameras, laser sensors, GPS hardware, and computers to snap pictures, determine the height of bridges, and record the slope of roads around the globe for 3-D digital maps.

Data for 3-D maps is already complete for several cities, including Berlin and Rome, with 50 cities currently in production. Maps of the United States and Asia could follow as early as next year.

Unlike two-dimensional navigational maps that show lines and arrows, 3-D maps show actual roads, flanked by buildings, trees and traffic signs.

“3-D maps render a very realistic picture of a street and its surroundings,” said Tele Atlas database director Georg Fisch. “If a friend tells you to look for a familiar store or restaurant at a specific corner, you’re going to see it.”

The data-gathering process involves a two-person team steering the camera-equipped van down roads, including highways and city streets, and snapping pictures along the way.

Belgians Stijn Ulenaers and Gudrun Vanlaar welcomed a group of journalists in Neuss, Germany, last week to hop in their Tele Atlas mobile mapping van and accompany them on a small trip to record street data in the area.

The van is fitted with two PCs, two detachable hard drives, a GPS system, a gyroscope, a tablet computer, and a mobile data card.

The pen-operated tablet PC, mounted between the driver and rider, shows in separate windows what each camera is recording and can also overlay a road map of the area, together with the vehicle’s location.

Six cameras — two in the front, one on the side, and three in the back — snap pictures every three seconds. The wide-angle lenses are configured to produce a 360-degree perspective.

The digital photos, together with their GPS positions and odometer readings (necessary in tunnels), are stored on two master and slave 250GB drives. The van can travel at speeds up to 130 kilometers per hour on highways when the sun is shinning but also as slow as 80 kilometers per hour when the weather is bad.

The fleet of Tele Atlas vans currently cover around 360,000 kilometers of roads a year, generating 250TB of data, which includes 2.8 billion digital pictures. The data is compiled in the Geographic Data File (GDF) format but can be converted to nearly all formats used by navigation system vendors and providers of mapping services, including TomTom International, Navman Europe, Google, and Microsoft.

All pictures are sent to India, where Tele Atlas employs several hundred people to map the images to existing road maps, aerial photographs, and other road information to ensure accuracy.

Could 3-D navigational systems add to the stress drivers already have, particularly on crowded, speedy European roads? Tele Atlas key account manager Sven Peters doesn’t think so. Voice instructions will remain a key feature of next-generation navigation systems, he said. What will change as a result of 3-D maps, however, is the quality of information that drivers receive when they look at the navigation screen.

Tele Atlas is not the only company working on developing 3-D maps for navigational systems. Navteq is one competitor. It’s still unclear, however, when consumers can expect to see 3-D navigational maps and what they’ll cost. “We’re busy compiling the data now, but it’s difficult to say when suppliers of navigation systems will want to invest in next-generation maps,” Peters said. “Many of them are still making good margins on their 2-D systems and don’t see a need right now to plunge into 3-D.”