Why did Facebook acquire Mapillary?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Recent threads on the acquisition announcement:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23564854

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23583034

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.

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.

to get to the other side of the road?