EveryScape

» see everyscape.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Mok3 was founded in Newton, Massachusetts in 2002 by Mok Oh, and it existed to solve a graphics problem. Given a handful of ordinary photographs of a place, could you compute the space between them well enough that somebody could move around inside it. Five years of that work turned into a consumer product, and in May 2007, the same month Google switched on Street View, the company showed it in San Francisco under a new name.

The public launch came on 29 October 2007. Four cities were in it, and one of them was Aspen, Colorado, which tells you the map was not being assembled by population. Lexington, Massachusetts arrived that December. Cambridge followed on 17 January 2008 and Laguna Beach a week after that. Philadelphia and San Francisco came in April, with Washington in the same batch. The coverage grew city by city, on foot, the way a magazine adds pages.

Investors liked it for a long time. Four and a half million dollars in 2005, seven million more in March 2008, another six million in February 2010, by which point Street View had been driving for three years and every one of those checks was a bet that driving was not the whole job. In December 2010 Microsoft agreed with the bet and built EveryScape captures into Bing Maps as a feature called Interior Views.

The coverage list is the entire distance from here. Boston, Cambridge, Beverly Hills, Laguna Beach. EveryScape was hand-building a walkable index of American main streets one storefront at a time, and the arithmetic of that meant Ankara was never on the roadmap and was never going to be. What eventually showed up where I live came from a car with a mast on the roof, and it stayed outside.

~ the dossier ~

~ inside the building ~

The difference from Street View was the doorway. Google photographed the public road and stopped at the curb. EveryScape kept going, into restaurants, hotel lobbies, shop floors, so that the click that would have moved you one car-length down the block instead put you at a table. VentureBeat, writing the week Street View launched, described the EveryScape experience as a magic carpet, which was a fair account of how the transitions felt when they worked.

Interiors were also where the business was. A restaurant that wanted its dining room in the index had a reason to pay for the shoot, and that made EveryScape a local advertising company wearing a mapping company's clothes. The last version of the consumer site leaned on user-contributed photos for the same reason. Capturing a city professionally cost real money, and the only way the map got bigger for free was if the people in it did the work.

~ what a city cost ~

Twenty cities in five years is the number that decided this. Street View was adding countries in that time, because a car with a camera on it covers a metropolitan area in weeks and needs no permission from anybody who owns a building. EveryScape needed a photographer, an appointment, and a business willing to be photographed, per address, forever.

So the product that was genuinely better at the thing it did was structurally slower at doing it, and the slower one ran out of runway first. By the time Bing shipped Interior Views, Google was already selling its own indoor capture through a network of trusted photographers, using the same argument to the same restaurants, with a search engine attached.

~ the address afterward ~

Nobody wrote a shutdown post. The archive has everyscape.com on 12 November 2012 with the same headline it had carried for years, telling you that you were moments away from experiencing the real world online. The capture on 28 November is a different site at the same address, headed Technology and Tools, with immersive advertising as the subheading and no city list anywhere on it.

The company kept going, which is the part that makes this a product death rather than a company one. The B2B page sat there until 2017, then became a page about creating your world and experiencing it together, and that page sat there until late 2023. In December 2023 the domain began redirecting to Infinityy, a real estate platform run by Jim Schoonmaker, who had been EveryScape's CEO the whole time. Twenty-one years after Mok3, he is still selling rooms you can walk through without going there.

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