We've been doing data collection

with these vehicles for about a year now.

We have 45 vehicles on the road, there's 22 in the US,

23 in Western Europe.

We'll be adding another 150 vehicles to the fleet in 2013.

We have two different types of camera systems on the car.

The first are high precision cameras, that's the lower set

of cameras that you see around.

You see them pointing at the buildings,

and off to the sides, and also in front of us.

It's capturing all the sign data, all of

the text information that you're seeing on buildings,

all the addressing.

The cameras on top are more panoramic imagery.

They're for creating beautiful pictures.

Now what really makes these vehicles unique,

is that sensor that's rotating there in the middle.

And that's what allows us to create

the 3D nature of the maps.

That is a laser sensor, there are 64 lasers in that device.

And as it rotates around, it's collecting 1.3 million

points of data every second.

Now these points of data each have an X, Y, and Z coordinate

associated with them, which means we can measure

the distance between any two points on there.

That means we can tell you what the width of this road is.

What the height of the curb is.

We can measure all of these buildings and create

an exact, 3D, digital representation then,

of this real world.

If you combine that point cloud of data,

Which doesn't have any color associated with it,

with the colors coming off the panoramic camera imagery,

Now all of the sudden, we can actually create

a digital representation that looks like

the world that we see here.