
Why did Facebook acquire Mapillary? - ephesee
https://medium.com/@joemorrison/why-on-earth-did-facebook-just-acquire-mapillary-9838405272f8
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seven4
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 or at least resided somewhere on a Facebook property that could be
linked out to? That at least would keep users in their scrupulously measured
web of control."_

I would flesh out one related/adjacent point.

~Google's mission statement: "Our company mission is to organize the world's
information and make it universally accessible and useful."

~Facebooks Mission Statement: "give people the power to build community and
bring the world closer together"

I'm not so naive as to suggest these ideals aren't deeply
infiltrated/influenced by commercial imperatives but it is possible to see the
way some of their behavior wraps around the stated principles. Google's credo
of organizing information aligns with building out immense location data - and
effectively mapping the world (and subsequently commercializing it). Whereas
with facebook what I have noticed is - given their size and scale; they can
follow their users (and subsequently envelope/"empower" user efforts to create
community) ...if need via acquisition. In the digital world this has mean't
buying the likes of instagram and whatsapp to ensure that community-building
happens under the nexus of Facebook's control. If you accept that facebook
believes in being where it's users are; understanding/being more proximate to
users and how they traverse the real-world is invaluable - you are now more
able to map out a digital proxy that is informed by person's experience of the
real world. By creating a more informed digital proxy you embed a user more
deeply in your ecosystem.

~~~
jacobwilliamroy
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.

~~~
jacobwilliamroy
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.

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

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Polylactic_acid
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 so you can add them to OSM which street view
does not allow.

~~~
iamleppert
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.

~~~
windthrown
"Unusable" for human eyes, or unusable for computers? The images do not need
to be very pretty for a computer to extract street signs and other features.

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ssivark
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).

Making the platform free to commercial users as well might be more in line
with Facebook’s business models — I’m guessing they’d rather create an API
which allows them to exfiltrate end-user data, than charge companies for using
their API.

~~~
canada_dry
> 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](https://github.com/facebookresearch/detectron2)

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

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bransonf
Wild prediction here, but I think this has largely to do with their VR/AR
business. Sure, having a platform to manage more spatial data is cool, but I
don't think this adds _that_ much value to their current data.

In comparison, it could be bleeding edge for AR. There are few companies with
a notable footprint in the street imagery business. Google is obviously number
one, HERE has their own fleet and I think maybe TomTom and a few others
actively capture this data.

What none of those companies have, however, is a flourishing VR/AR play.
Zuckerberg is clearly bullish on VR/AR and Oculus is largely leading the
consumer market.

This is where my prediction gets wild, Facebook intends to replicate real
world environments in virtual reality. This is what OpenSfM could potentially
do with enough hands on it.

I spent a considerable amount of time trying to do this myself. Photogrammetry
is still in its infancy, but it works. I replicated my office in virtual
reality using a phone app and Unity. I wanted to do the same with a single
street, and that's how I first came across Mapillary. The technical challenge
was too much for me, but I know it's possible based on literature.

Imagine doing this at scale with a network of vehicles and much improved
software. You could, hypothetically, replicate the roads of New York City in a
3D environment. Imagine playing a video game in a real world environment, or
simply being able to walk the streets of a place you've never been before.
These could be transcendent experiences.

~~~
shostack
Your prediction isn't a prediction. It's fact. Just watch the videos posted
from the previous Oculus Connect [1]. They demo some early prototypes to show
their vision.

Several times I needed to pick my jaw off the floor from what they've
accomplished with mapping the real world and virtualizing it. The fidelity is
breathtaking.

If they keep up the pace of miniaturization we'll have Rainbow's End before we
know it.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLL2xVXGs1SP78z-KC3S1Z...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLL2xVXGs1SP78z-KC3S1ZYV_67gT7Sk9i)

~~~
campchase
Hey this is Joe from the blog post. Holy shit. I didn’t know about any of
this.

~~~
shostack
Holy shit indeed. Any new thoughts as a result of this?

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dang
Recent threads on the acquisition announcement:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23564854](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23564854)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23583034](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23583034)

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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.

~~~
gyre007
I tend to agree with this. Facebook also silently acquired the very amibitious
UK startup called [https://www.scape.io/](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.

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NotSammyHagar
Well worth a read. The article considers why facebook bought this. Maybe to
help _other_ competitors to facebook, cause they will be giving away all their
mapping data for commercial use now.

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KMag
You mean other Google competitors, not FB competitors, right?

~~~
NotSammyHagar
Yes, sorry, it could help other competitors to Google, like other mapping
companies

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devmunchies
to get to the other side of the road?

