Google acquires 360-degree photography startup Digisfera to beef up Street View

Google has acquired Digisfera, a startup focused on working with panoramic images. Digisfera’s employees will be joining the Street View team at Google “to continue building great experiences using 360° photography.” Financial details of the deal were not revealed.

Founded in January 2011, Portugal-based Digisfera describes itself as a company that provides “photography, design, and development services for projects involving 360° images.” The startup has undertaken many panoramic projects over the past five years, including photographing the inauguration of U.S. president Barack Obama, the Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, and the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

In addition to projects, Digisfera also developed two sets of tools. PanoTag lets developers add tagging functionality to their apps and Marizano is a 360-degree viewer that supports all major desktop browsers and mobile devices.

Google is discontinuing PanoTag; Digisfera engineers will be working on Street View instead and so “it will no longer be possible to keep developing PanoTag.” New customers are no longer being accepted, and the PanoTag servers will be taken offline on October 31, at which point apps that depend on them will stop working.

Google plans to open-source Marzipano “in the coming weeks.” According to Digisfera, the hope is “this will benefit the panoramic photography community.” Here are the tool’s main features:

• Embraces the web: Designed to work with web standards. Control the viewer with a powerful Javascript API and create interfaces using standard HTML and CSS.
• Browser support: The preferred technology is WebGL, but all major devices and desktop browsers are supported down to Internet Explorer 8, using Flash and CSS fallbacks.
• Great performance: Marzipano is optimized to display 360° images of any size with the best performance possible. It is also lightweight: 55KB when gzipped.

Digisfera was founded by António Cabral and his son Manuel Cabral. It is not currently clear if both will be transitioning to Google.

Source :Venture Beat