Hi everyone!
I’m the founder of Trek View. I have also been working with Nick Whitelegg on OTV, also linked in @juanman’s post.
Our joint focus is on off-road 360 imagery and we have some plans for the next few months to ship some new features to our respective open-source code.
That said, for the most part, the underlying tech is similar, regardless of what is being captured (roads / paths / etc).
We use a lot of tools that already exist in some open-source form (e.g. ffmpeg for processing video files, exiftool for metadata, Pannellum for 360 viewing, opensfm for image transitions, etc.).
For us, the end destination after this processing is Mapillary and Open Trail View.
I am still a firm supporter (still) of Mapillary. They have done a lot for the industry (and continue to do so with integration into OSM). Don’t get me wrong, I get the anti-FB sentiment, but the sad truth is, hosting a platform like Mapillary is very expensive. For large tech companies spending 100k EUR / mo (or more) on hosting is nothing, for a private company this is a lot of money. The larger you are, the more it costs, which can make growing harder and harder.
It would be great to have a much clearer statement about Mapillary and FB’s intentions. I also know, having worked at companies that have been acquired, the road map is not always very clear. In many cases the acquired company/product disappears entirely within a year or two (this is my biggest fear)
All being said, I am all for working together on improved solutions (with openess and privacy at the core). I know many in the OSM community are having similar discussions around similar points to those raised in this thread.
How about we take this discussion away from Mapillary and into a public forum elsewhere (with the OSM community)? I’ll set this up today (probably a Slack team) – if you are interested in joining the discussion (all welcome, even if you’re not technical), please email me and I will send out an invite: dgreenwood@trekview.org).