Tele Atlas - Mapping Vans

Mapping Vans

The company keeps its data up-to-date in part through a fleet of dozens of mapping vans equipped with "six cameras, two side-sweeping lasers and a GPS navigation device." The vans capture about three photos per second while traveling at normal speeds, resulting in more than 100 million images per year from each van; the images are stored on one of two hard disk drives within a metal cabinet inside the van, drives that hold about two weeks of data. Meanwhile, the 3-D scanning lasers record the width, height and contours of the first reflective surface they encounter, producing data that when combined with the images create a three-dimension representation. Three-dimension representations are already available in Japan and Western Europe; people at the company's U.S. headquarters in Lebanon, New Hampshire, near Dartmouth College, expected in August 2009 that by the beginning of 2011, devices based on Tele Atlas data will be able to depict the surroundings in photo-realistic detail.

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