SAN JOSE, Calif. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — May 22, 2009 — earthmine, inc. today unveiled Wild Style City ( http://www.wildstylecity.com), a virtual graffiti application that turns the urban environment into a canvas that any user can annotate with a palette of interactive geo-tagging tools. Announced at the Where 2.0 conference being held this week in San Jose, California, Wild Style City is a “virtual” world that recreates the graffiti sub-culture that exists in real urban environments. The application is uniquely enabled by earthmine’s 3D street level imagery and Flash Viewer API and supports the company’s focus on delivering street level, 3D mapping software and data as a service. Wild Style City demonstrates both the flexibility and ease of use of earthmine’s technology platform and development tools and is free to users.
“Wild Style City is an exploration into what people create when given the ability to freely express themselves and their ideas in specific places,” said Anthony Fassero, co-founder and co-CEO of earthmine. “Viewers can enjoy the images, add to them, erase them or even start over. It’s as close as you can get to the graffiti experience without the obvious real world consequences. But just like in the real world, no piece of graffiti is permanent and can be removed or replaced by the community.”
Wild Style City
Wild Style City is uniquely enabled by earthmine’s platform, with 3D data associated with every pixel allowing users to “paint” on buildings in true 3D space. The application itself was developed using the earthmine Flash Viewer API, which provides access to earthmine’s data library for Adobe Flash, Flex or AIR based applications and is currently in beta. The site offers users an immersive world and a comprehensive set of drawing tools to create their masterpiece and have it shown to an audience of potentially millions of viewers. Users can uncover the layers laid upon initial art -- art that is specific to that exact location, allowing people to express and share their artistic talents.
“Graffiti by its very nature is a social exercise and is intimate to a particular location,” said John Ristevski, co-founder and co-CEO of earthmine. “Wild Style City captures the essence of both of those aspects. Now, art that is created on a building or in a very specific location can be preserved and enjoyed long after the physical building has been re-painted or even destroyed. We expect Wild Style City to morph into a community of its own.”
Wild Style City also demonstrates the ability to insert contextual and location specific advertising through “virtual” billboards which can be placed throughout the city. These billboards become part of the 3D scene itself, providing a realistic mechanism to deliver static content, such as images, or dynamic content, such as video, to viewers in a seamless manner. In the near future, this billboard content could be also delivered to location aware mobile devices as part of an augmented reality experience. earthmine’s Flash Viewer API provides developers with tools enabling them to create applications that can include advertising as part of their overall business model.
earthmine Technology
earthmine is focused on a wide range of market segments, including engineering and construction, infrastructure management, real estate, architecture and design, homeland security, disaster management and emergency services, transportation, local search and companies delivering innovative solutions in the consumer and mobile space.
In April, the company announced its new robust and durable data collection system designed for data collection in any type of environment. The platform includes a vertically offset stereo-panoramic camera array that allows for the capture of full 360 degree spherical images with consistent 3D coverage. At the same time, the company unveiled its Project and Collection Partner programs, allowing it to quickly expand the data collection process across the United States and around the world, while providing customers with control over where and when data is collected.
About earthmine
earthmine inc. is a street level, 3D mapping company that provides software and data as a service to those who gather, analyze and communicate location-based information from a street-level perspective. The company is focused on indexing reality, creating a robust geospatial data mine of our urban environments that is accessed from the human perspective. earthmine solutions enable better informed and more effective geospatial decision making by delivering a highly accurate and realistic user experience that can be easily viewed, annotated, analyzed, measured and shared. The company, headquartered in Berkeley, California, was founded in 2006 and is privately-held. For more information, visit www.earthmine.com or follow earthmine on Twitter at http://twitter.com/earthmine.
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