Google’s giving its Street View team a pretty significant boost with the acquisition of Digisfera, a Portuguese startup that specializes in panoramic images. The startup has undertaken numerous panoramic projects over the years, and has even developed a couple of tools sets to help with 360-degree photography, one of which is being discontinued by Google while the other is being open-sourced. As for Digisfera’s employees, they’ll be joining the Street View team in order to improve the service, though how Google intends to use they’re experience in 360-degree photography remains unclear.
Google has acquired 360-degree photography startup Digisfera, which is focused on panoramic images, to bolster the company’s Street View. Google confirmed the acquisition with tech news website VentureBeat, but did not disclose details regarding the acquisition. “We’re excited to join the Street View team at Google to continue building great experiences using 360° photography,” wrote Digisfera on its website to announce the acquisition. Digisfera, based in Portugal, was founded in 2011. The company has been involved in many projects for panoramic images since then, including taking panoramic pictures of United States President Barack Obama’s inauguration, the Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil during the 2014 World Cup and the 2014 Winter Olympics held in Sochi, Russia. Digisfera has also created two tools, namely PanoTag and Marzipano. PanoTag allows developers to add tagging features to their apps, while Marzipano processes panoramas to turn them into 360-degree images. With the acquisition, Google will be discontinuing PanoTag, with no new customers to be accepted and the servers of PanoTag to be taken down at the end of the month, which would cause apps using the technology to stop functioning.
