Google acquires panorama start-up Digisfera to uplift Street View experience

Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL)’s Unit Google has bought a small startup firm known as Digisfera.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Digsfera in a note on its site confirmed that its employees will be joining the Street View team at Google.

“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.

As a specialist in 360-degree photography, Portugal-based Digisfera has been targeting its products at projects looking to tap into 360-degree photography experiences. It will be interesting to see how Google will incorporate the newly acquired technology to intensify the 360 degree mapping tool but it’s likely to make Google’s Street View far more interactive. The company specializes in photography, designing and developing services for the events and projects involving 360 degree panoramic images, and has been part of a few prominent projects over the period of five years. Their involvement includes photographing the inauguration of the United States president, Barack Obama and covering the stadium environment during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil and also 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

As a result of the acquisition, Digisfera has discontinued, PanoTag, the tagging system that was allowing photographers to popularise their panoramic views on social networks.

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.

For Digisfera Marzipano technology, Google will enable the technology under open source license soon as reported by Engadget. Marzipano has been created to work with web standards, and while WebGL is preferred, it will work with all major Internet browsers and devices. The best feature for the tool is the ability for it to display 360º photography on any platform without disrupting it even though the tool is only 55kb in size.