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Why did Facebook acquire Mapillary?

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Re: Why did Facebook acquire Mapillary?

#21

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

iamleppert wrote: post #8
Polylactic_acid wrote: post #6

Its still puzzling to me why facebook wanted it. I have used mappilary a bit and it is not an alternative to google street view. The images tend to be shit quality at odd angles and with window reflections in the way and are not 360 degrees like googles are. The only purpose of mappilary in my view is for open street map mapping since the images are usually good enough to read points of interest on the side of roads…

I agree the quality of the images are very poor. Why go through all that effort of data collection with such inferior hardware? Most of the images are completely unusable.

I’d rather have Mapillary’s imperfect images of a trail than Google’s blank images because they haven’t driven a Street View car down there.

Re: Why did Facebook acquire Mapillary?

#23

Post by jpalomaki »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #6

Its still puzzling to me why facebook wanted it. I have used mappilary a bit and it is not an alternative to google street view. The images tend to be shit quality at odd angles and with window reflections in the way and are not 360 degrees like googles are. The only purpose of mappilary in my view is for open street map mapping since the images are usually good enough to read points of interest on the side of roads…

Maybe they just wanted to make sure the data is available for OSM development also in the future.

Re: Why did Facebook acquire Mapillary?

#24

Post by KaiserPro »

Its entirely down to AR.

Facebook need a sub CM accurate, self-updating, visual positioning map. Its the only practical way that "multiplayer" AR can work. (in fact any kind of useful AR)

SLAM only gets you so far (as we've seen with google and apple) as its only capable of tracking relative movements (if you have two phones, both their coordinate systems will be relative to their starting point, making accurate placing of assets impractical )

So what does mapillary do that helps?

1) the real time segmentation on a mobile phone is fucking spectacular, compare the speed and robustness to FB's panopticon, it blows everything out of the water

2) the geolocation of random imagery allows facebook to build out a sparse pointcloud suitable for generating cityscale visual positioning.

3) the anonymisation pipeline they have is also very good.

Re: Why did Facebook acquire Mapillary?

#25

Post by KaiserPro »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #6

Its still puzzling to me why facebook wanted it. I have used mappilary a bit and it is not an alternative to google street view. The images tend to be shit quality at odd angles and with window reflections in the way and are not 360 degrees like googles are. The only purpose of mappilary in my view is for open street map mapping since the images are usually good enough to read points of interest on the side of roads…

> points of interest on the side of roads so you can add them to OSM

Pretty much this. It allows the "livemaps" offering to build out its visual positioning server faster.

Re: Why did Facebook acquire Mapillary?

#26

Post by KaiserPro »

canada_dry wrote: post #7
ssivark wrote: post #4

My guess would have been AR being the biggest driving force. Oh, and every outdoor photo on Facebook can now more easily be “placed in context” on the map. Especially given Facebook’s “sell the users” business model, an accurate map of where the users are with respect to where the advertisers are would be quite useful to them (and it wouldn’t do to depend on Google, since they’ll butt heads as advertising platforms).…

> and every outdoor photo on Facebook can now more easily be “placed in context” When you factor in their ML prowess [i] it's not hard to imagine that every photo you submit w̶i̶l̶l̶ is getting automagically tagged with an astonishing amount of context: who, what, when, and where ( why too since they have all of your chats/messages too). [i] https://github.com/facebookresearch/detectron2

Google are more likley to do this first. They already have a global scale visual positioning service.

Re: Why did Facebook acquire Mapillary?

#27

Post by gyre007 »

KaiserPro wrote: post #24

Its entirely down to AR. Facebook need a sub CM accurate, self-updating, visual positioning map. Its the only practical way that "multiplayer" AR can work. (in fact any kind of useful AR) SLAM only gets you so far (as we've seen with google and apple) as its only capable of tracking relative movements (if you have two phones, both their coordinate systems will be relative to their starting point, making accurate plac…

I tend to agree with this. Facebook also silently acquired the very amibitious UK startup called https://www.scape.io/ whose mission was VPS = Visual Positioning System. Their SDK/APIs allowed to build AR app easily, but now they're part of FB. That makes me think that its AR which is here at play.

Re: Why did Facebook acquire Mapillary?

#28

Post by jacobwilliamroy »

seven4 wrote: post #13

Great read on the possible rationale - Summarising #1 It Hurts Google - erodes googles dominance vis a vis commercial access to geospatial data + a viable reason to collect valuable location data on end users. #2 It Complements Their Augmented Reality Business #3 It Supports Facebook’s Place Data Generally "what if street level imagery and supplementary data like reviews were built directly into Facebook’s products o…

Facebook has completely failed. New York and Sydney have been thousands of miles apart since Facebook first set out to "bring the world closer together" and they haven't budged an inch since then.

Re: Why did Facebook acquire Mapillary?

#29

Post by jacobwilliamroy »

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #28
seven4 wrote: post #13

Great read on the possible rationale - Summarising #1 It Hurts Google - erodes googles dominance vis a vis commercial access to geospatial data + a viable reason to collect valuable location data on end users. #2 It Complements Their Augmented Reality Business #3 It Supports Facebook’s Place Data Generally "what if street level imagery and supplementary data like reviews were built directly into Facebook’s products o…

Facebook has completely failed. New York and Sydney have been thousands of miles apart since Facebook first set out to "bring the world closer together" and they haven't budged an inch since then.

But even if we dont take them literally: the united states is on the brink of civil war. We're more divided than ever, at the same time that individuals are spending record screen time engaged with facebook. Complete and utter failure to bring people together. The shareholders ought to have zuckerberg pilloried.

Re: Why did Facebook acquire Mapillary?

#30

Post by jsterSC »

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #29
jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook has completely failed. New York and Sydney have been thousands of miles apart since Facebook first set out to "bring the world closer together" and they haven't budged an inch since then.

But even if we dont take them literally: the united states is on the brink of civil war. We're more divided than ever, at the same time that individuals are spending record screen time engaged with facebook. Complete and utter failure to bring people together. The shareholders ought to have zuckerberg pilloried.

There's something about divide and conquer in there, i'm sure of it.
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