At the CTIA show, I talked to one of Tele Atlas' "van intern", Ashwin Balan on how the company is using vans to map the world in 2D and 3D. There's actually quite a lot of technology inside and outside those vans, including 8 cameras triggered every 8 metres by a distance measurement indicator sensor (DMI) mounted on the rear wheel, a server that stores the JPEG images, a differential GPS that pinpoints the location of the vehicle to a quarter of an inch and a laser for 3D images. For the system to work, the vans can not go over 33 miles per hour in the city and 60 miles on the highway. It'll take a month for one of these vans to map the whole San Francisco.But it'll take between 2 weeks up to several months to process all the data collected on a particular day, depending on how backlogged/busy the group that do that at TeleAtlas is. And the company has 24 of these vans!