San Franciscans may have noticed an odd, camera-laden car driving through city streets taking photos of everything, but this time, it wasn't Google. The car belongs instead to earthmine, whose cameras capture more data than Google's do, using a higher-resolution, stereo photography technique that assigns specific points in space to every captured surface.

To demonstrate the power of its virtual version of San Francisco (other cities to follow), earthmine deployed the data on Wednesday as Wild Style City, a free, graffiti-oriented service that lets you navigate real San Francisco streets in a Flash viewer and tag surfaces using a variety of tools of the trade – paint rollers, spray paint and markers, stuffed into a virtual backpack alongside an actionable map of the city, which includes public transportation options. After you ride the subway, you'll even hear BART's trademark electric whine as the train leaves the station.

The key to earthmine's system is its detailed collection of three-dimensional data, which occupies more data per street than Google Street View. The company considered using lasers to figure out where everything in San Francisco is, but opted instead for stereo photography, which captures two simultaneous images to create a 3-D map – somewhat similar to the way in which our two eyes let us gauge distance.

"Every pixel in the image is 3-D," earthmine co-founder and co-CEO Anthony Fassero told Wired.com. "You could actually click on one corner [of a building] and click on another corner, and get a real-world measurement." He says earthmine is the only company in the world with technology for assigning each 3-D pixel a real-world equivalent on all three axes – longitude, latitude and elevation.

You enter this virtual San Francisco equipped with everything you need to navigate the city and tag it up to your heart's content. You can double-click a designated blank area to start painting, vote for other people's art by declaring it "the bomb," browse the city's highest-rated tags, take public transportation to a new location or jump to a random spot on the map.

"Graffiti is an age-old way of talking about things," explained Fassero, and he's right. My Latin 5 teacher once showed our class obscene graffiti from Caesar's time. "We actually work with real graffiti artists here in San Francisco, and some out in Denver and other places, and these are the exact same tools that graffiti artists would use."

For instance, the whitewash paint roller with which you clear up space for a new tag is limited to the width it would be in real life. If you want to create a large canvas, you'll have to spend a good chunk of time paint-rolling with your mouse.

The real-world graffiti skill set translates to Wild Style City's tools fairly well. To the right is a tag that Fassero said a "pro" graffiti artist added to the map in about five minutes.

If you're used to bopping around a first-person shooter videogame fragging the enemy at a lightning-fast pace, Wild Style City's slow-loading, high-resolution images will drag at first. It'd be nice if you could enter a specific address and teleport there, rather than clicking through each screen (the public transportation options solve the problem to an extent). But overall, earthmine's demonstration of the sort of thing that's possible with its data succeeds. It actually made me feel a bit nostalgic for the San Francisco I left behind over three years ago.

"You don't actually have to go somewhere anymore to be able to experience a place," said Fassero. "It's about really hitting that hyper-local experience, and being able to see it in a way that's realistic."

Earthmine released Wild Style City because it's fun, but also to show potential partners how detailed their 3-D information is. For example, the city of San Francisco could license earthmine's data to check the exact location (longitude, latitude and elevation) of every fire hydrant and bus stop in the city for planning purposes – possibly in conjunction with the open-source transportation models the LimeWire CEO is working on.

The exclusive screenshot to the right shows earthmine mashed with Google Maps – the system San Francisco would use for that. In fact, Fassero says, the city is already interested in a somewhat ironic use for Wild Style City.

"Just as we're putting in graffiti here, the same goes for cleaning up [real] graffiti," added Fassero. "If the city says, 'Oh, we need to clean this up,' they can map it and send a ground crew out there." At that point, Wild Style City would be the only place to see the old graffiti – assuming no one has painted over it online. Even then, Wild Style City denizens could revert to an earlier reality in order to see it.

This should be just the tip of the iceberg for earthmine. Fassero hinted that next-generation directory services running on the company's data will appear later this fall, and said the company's stereo-photographing car will soon set its course for other west-coast cities. And once third-party developers get their hands on the company's API, we expect even wackier and more useful implementations.

The API is free, but earthmine plans to sell its data as a service. "Think of us as the white-label for a lot of applications," said Fassero. "We're hoping to be the data provider – and we are the data provider for some people we can't mention yet – for a lot of local search and mapping companies, but also, for a whole group of really creative people out there [with more ambitious ideas]."

Earthmine's data will be free for companies with a small number of users, with different price points available for companies of various sizes. The rest of the company's business model involves in-world advertising. It plans to add video billboards to Wild Style City, and might even consider allowing people to spray paint over the ads (with a daily refresh).

"You're looking at the ad the whole time you're graffiti-ing it, right?" added Fassero. "It'd be a really high impression rate." He mentioned that nothing in current U.S. law would prevent the company from covering real-life ads with virtual replacements.

Third parties looking to harness this data might wonder how long it takes to put together a new app using earthmine's API. According to Fassero, Wild Style City was created by an earthmine developer playing around with the API on a couple of his days off. A few weeks later, the team released it as a final product.

One more thing: When earthmine's car drove past 171 Fell street, it captured this guy staring at a blank wall (right). It's now considered one of the most desirable surfaces in Wild Style City, due to the built-in spectator.

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