The last time we heard from EveryScape, the startup that’s out to create video tours of various cities, was looking for Scape Artists, individuals that would be willing to contribute their photography skills to EveryScape’s efforts. It was also looking to the community for feedback, letting them know which cities on which they should be focusing their next efforts.
So here we are, a couple of months later, with EveryScape’s new Real World Online, having added several features to its initial service, further developed its video tours, and added Boston and New York to its list, with Miami and Aspen having been moved into the second stages of development, which includes more details and virtual exploration options for end users. We’ll get to these later.
I spent the good part of my weekend using EveryScape, and I really like the direction in which it’s going. It’s built a great deal of content on its original offering, and is beginning to have a healthy collection of street tours around various cities. You can set the tours to auto-guide, or control where the tour goes for yourself. Similar to Google Street Views, EveryScape is recorded in a similar manner, with sets of photographs being taken from atop a moving vehicle driving through the city. Unlike Google Street Views, however, EveryScape offers a more comprehensive look at what city you’re touring, with a natural flow that works better with people’s existing intuitions.
Beside the video tour is a map of the current city, which shows icons of what areas are available for detailed touring. As part of the second phase, EveryScape has worked with a few local businesses in order to provide internal tours for places like museums, restaurants, and other tourist spots. These internal tours are broken down into areas, like upstairs, downstairs, lobby, pool area, etc., based on the type of location that’s being explored. The places available for internal touring are marked with orange icons on the associated map.
I’m also seeing EveryScape moving in the direction of a local search engine, which is so far pretty well done. You can select an exact location based on address, category or business name. When viewing an individual location, you can get some basic info for certain spaces, like the rating and price range for restaurants and hotels. From there, you can continue your visual exploration by checking out nearby places based on the type of activity you’re looking for, such as shopping, nightlife, etc.
There’s also a few one-click search options that will give you additional information from third-party resources, such as a location’s official website, Yelp, Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, Expedia and TripAdvisor. This is a helpful resource because it lets you easily open up a more complete circle of information based on your initial local search, and taps in nicely to different types of users, including those seeking out travel information.
Another thing I noticed is the presence of “mini-billboards” for certain locations that offer up advertising opportunities for local businesses. This seems like a sensible form of monetization that can easily be expanded upon for multimedia advertisements. EveryScape hasn’t let on as to what it’s third phase will bring, but I hope it includes more community features. Currently, there doesn’t seem to be any types of accounts you can create in order to save tours to your favorites list, or other social sharing options. There’s also no user contribution features for the inclusion of user ratings, reviews and comments.
But there are no limits on how EveryScape can be used as a service, from mobile use (as Do Me London and Whrrl have done), to the building of a larger social network, such as Chockti has begun to do. What I’d love to see is the use of EveryScape content for mashups and other uses, such as narrated tours.
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