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Enjoy map making? Well, a website to inspire you is www.seety.co.uk

The people behind Seety have been working on mapping technologies and panoramic images for the last few years. Based on their experience, they have created a site that works the same way as Google's Street View. However, they have beaten the search engine giant in their coverage of London. While Google is still promising to realise the data at some time in the future, Seety has gone ahead and done it.

The imagery uses Google Maps as an index.

'There's nothing really magic or rocket science going on here; we just use consumer level electronics and some proprietary software,’ they say.

The picture acquisition is completely automated so a single operator can just focus on driving; he is able to map around 40 kilometres per day. They claim to have driven more than 1000 kilometres and produced a total of 171,103 pictures.

Seety have used a couple of Volkswagen Golf cars with panoramic cameras mounted on the roof. After the initial acquisition phase the only post-processing is a check for images that might violate someone's privacy.

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