Google has acquired 360-degree photography startup Digisfera, which is focused on panoramic images, to bolster the company's Street View.
Google confirmed the acquisition with tech news website VentureBeat, but did not disclose details regarding the acquisition.
"We're excited to join the Street View team at Google to continue building great experiences using 360° photography," wrote Digisfera on its website to announce the acquisition.
Digisfera, based in Portugal, was founded in 2011. The company has been involved in many projects for panoramic images since then, including taking panoramic pictures of United States President Barack Obama's inauguration, the Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil during the 2014 World Cup and the 2014 Winter Olympics held in Sochi, Russia.
Digisfera has also created two tools, namely PanoTag and Marzipano. PanoTag allows developers to add tagging features to their apps, while Marzipano processes panoramas to turn them into 360-degree images.
With the acquisition, Google will be discontinuing PanoTag, with no new customers to be accepted and the servers of PanoTag to be taken down at the end of the month, which would cause apps using the technology to stop functioning.
On the other hand, Marzipano will be open-sourced within the coming weeks for the benefit of the panoramic photography community. Marzipano has been designed to work with web standards, and while WebGL is preferred, it will work with all major Internet browsers and devices. Marzipano, which is optimized to show 360-degree images of varying sizes with the best possible performance, is also lightweight, coming in at only 55KB when zipped.
Digisfera's engineers will work on Street View to improve the service, though the exact plans of Google is not yet known.
Google recently announced that users can soon be able to enter virtual reality with Street View using Google Cardboard. With Street View recently splitting off from Maps into its own app, the feature looks to expand even more, and Google's acquisition of Digisfera could mean more things to come.
