If you loved Google Street View, you’ll love EveryScape! This web site takes Street View’s eye-level, panoramic-photo view of the streets a step further, creating explorable three-dimentional environments out of regular two-dimentional photos. While this sounds a little abstract, a visit to their beta site for New York certainly makes it clear just how remarkable this is in practice. EveryScape has launched sites four cities: Boston, New York, Miami and Aspen. Their technology will allow anyone with a decent camera and GPS unit to contribute their own images, turning the platform into a participatory mapping project. The cities that Boston-based startup is launching with were primarily done by their employees, but that will not always be the case in the future.

Map pages of the site show a 3D’d streetside view in a Flash player that is in sync with a normal street map. You can use either to navigate through the streets of a city. They do Google one better by letting you take a 360-degree view of a location, letting you gaze up at the billboards of Times Square or down at the gutter in the East Village. Plus, when you see an orange marker like a chess pawn, you can retrieve additional information is about the location. I explored all over the Times Square area and was disturbed to find I could even count the souvenir cabs in the tourist traps. So get out there and start exploring!