Earthmine to provide 3D street views for French yellow pages

Landing one of its first big converts to its technology, 3D street-level mapping company Earthmine has cut a deal with a big advertising company in France to produce a 3D street view platform for local search.

This kind of visually-aided local search could prove to be pretty handy if you’re walking or driving around a city where you don’t know your surroundings. The visual cues can be much more useful than a plain text search, especially if you’re getting close to a place but don’t know what it looks like.

Berkeley, Calif.-based Earthmine will create an immersive 3D platform for PagesJaunes Groupe, the French equivalent of Yellow Pages. Earthmine lets you surf through a city in 3D. You view still images of the city that appear to be three dimensional because they are an aggregation of 2D panoramic photos stitched together. The look is much like Google’s Street View, but Earthmine can embed all sorts of data into the images as you can see above.

PagesJaunes Groupe will call its platform Urban Dive. You can use it to take virtual tours of cities, viewing the streets as if you were driving down them. You can find places, connect with brands, and share experiences with friends. In the partnership, PagesJaunes has commissioned Earthmine to collect imagery on 150 major cities. It does so by driving down the streets with a “stereo panoramic camera array” to collect high-quality and high-resolution images with corresponding latitude, longitude and elevation data for each pixel in every image.

Earthmine provides an applications programming interface so that developers can build applications on top of the platform for web, desktop or mobile environments. PagesJaunes generated revenues of 1.2 billion euros in 2009 through printed directories, phone information service, and web information sites. It has more than 770,000 advertisers.

Julien Billot, deput chief executive of PagesJaunes Groupe, said that the technology for 3D representation will put the company on the cutting edge of local search. Businesses can advertise their presence online by getting their messages embedded in Urban Dive. PagesJaunes plans to launch a beta version in late 2010 for PC and mobile devices, including the iPad and the iPhone. The initial service will cover Paris and Marseille, extending to 150 French cities in 2011.

Earthmine was founded in 2006, and it debuted in the spring of 2007. Its Wild Style City was a 3D visual map that let you create graffiti on top of real locations. That applications garnered nearly 60,000 pieces of graffiti art, but it was mainly meant to show off the technology.

Earthmine chief executive Anthony Fassero said the company has generated a lot of business from transportation, government, utility, and petroleum industry customers. The company makes money by licensing its software and licensing the data it collects; hence, with PagesJaunes, Earthmine can make a lot of money because it is releasing data for 150 cities. Google’s Google Maps with StreetView Blue Dasher are rivals.

For an Earthmine video demo, see here or below.

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