PALO ALTO, California — “I didn’t think it could be done,” says Tim Caro-Brice, a Stanford University graduate student and pioneering member of Amazon.com’s A9.com project team. Barnaby Dorfman, A9.com’s vice president, laughs and taps the accelerator. A nondescript sport utility vehicle eases down a Palo Alto street, and the rest may be search engine history.
Dorfman and Caro-Brice are part of the small team responsible for the block-view technology A9.com launched this spring, which allows users to virtually stroll city streets to get directions and identify local businesses. The vehicle they drive is a prototype for the mini fleet currently crisscrossing the United States in a photographing spree, racing to put a visual Yellow Pages online.
While the duo is not quite Lewis and Clark, Dorfman and Caro-Brice are decidedly human surveyors in a hotly contested field dominated thus far by satellite images. This pedestrian point of view is parent company Amazon.com‘s latest bid to help A9.com differentiate itself in the local search market, which has seen a number of mapping innovations from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo this year. (Not to mention the continuing flood of hacks.)
A9.com’s trucks have been rolling for about a year now. They have already photo-mapped 20 major American cities (with a bank of 30 million images) as part of an aggressive rollout, capturing, by their estimate, storefront images for 1 million of the 14 million small businesses in the United States. The fleet, currently two vehicles strong, is barreling through New Mexico and Minnesota right now.
The truck itself is fairly innocuous. A FireWire cable snakes up from a rear door window to a roof-mounted storage box. Peering out from an opening in the right side of the box is a consumer-grade digital video camera, which is running constantly.
Inside the truck, a laptop sitting on the passenger seat records movement on a map and controls the camera as it brings in a steady stream of visuals that, at 30 frames per second, is adequate for generating the image stills that create the A9.com Möbius strip. A Garmin GPS device, portable hard drive, DC/AC power inverter and power strip complete the picture. A “neutered,” buttonless mouse dangles over the passenger seat, its gentle motion keeping the laptop from hibernating.
Less visible is the gyroscope attached to the truck’s accelerator, which helps determine relative position where satellite line of sight is unavailable. This innovation, which calculates time and speed between recorded GPS points, can determine the path in between those fixed points, effectively defeating the classic GPS dilemma of “urban canyons.” A9.com has patented several such elements.
“The physical world is a very irregular place, this has been our challenge,” says Dorfman. “We’re trying to create a window into the places you visit — and visualizing it the way you visit them.”
A9.com’s gambit, “to provide every small business in America with a web page,” recalls Microsoft’s failed attempt with Sidewalk in the ’90s. But Microsoft didn’t have Amazon.com’s 900,000 seller accounts, user recommendations, click-to-call or other features. Users can submit additional images, such as business interiors, along with Yellow Pages-type information such as hours of operation or payment options.
Although much of the process of posting the data is automated, the user community has been quick to notice Easter eggs and other irregularities. The Naked Cowboy of Times Square is there in his full glory; in an early shot of the New York Stock Exchange, a tourist could be seen riding the bull statue. Dorfman says that A9.com images have reappeared on Flickr as “art by accident” for sharing. The photographing of federal government buildings in Washington, D.C., a mere week before last year’s election, prompted some tense moments with the Secret Service.
“We’re familiarizing people with their surroundings before they inhabit them,” says Dorfman. “It’s about traveling there before you go.”
“There’s something about this view which is different,” he says, pointing out that A9.com’s block view is providing an unbiased bank of images. Far from the ideally lit, airbrushed photos typical of ads for real estate or accommodations, these visuals tell no lies.
They also offer context. Caro-Brice thinks users will end up using A9.com for apartment hunting, for example, and for locating desirable neighborhoods and green spaces. Also, users would never again fret over booking their elderly relatives into a motel adjacent to a dive bar. No mapping tool can yet provide this kind of consumer intelligence.
The A9.com team may be at the forefront, but there is a widening race for street-level mapping. At neighboring Stanford and University of California at Berkeley campuses, efforts are already underway. Berkeley researcher Avideh Zakhor has proposed a way of grafting photo facades onto 3-D scenes to create whole neighborhood environments in minutes as opposed to hours. At Stanford, the Google team is rumored to be using laser technology to provide an added layer of detail to building modeling. There are likely others out there. But it’s A9.com that has already mapped Fargo, North Dakota — a bit of hometown homage from one of the team.
“I’d love to look back at this in 40 years and get a sense of what we’ve accomplished here,” says Dorfman. “We’ll probably be able to access historical data and do time-lapsed views of this block.
“I like to think we are bringing a new and valuable data set online.”
