You're racing along in a speedboat with a group of soldiers in full battle gear.

People are screaming "Go! Go! Now!" You decide to look behind to see if your buddy has fallen into the choppy water. You move your mouse and the video display obediently shows that's he still back there, hanging on for dear life.

All in a day's play for many "shoot 'em up" video games, but the footage I'm watching on my computer isn't some fake universe created in a game designer's mind. It's real video of real soldiers in a real boat, captured with a special spherical camera whose 11 lenses can look in every direction.

And this Canadian technology may change everything from how we plan pipeline routes to how we catch shoplifters and attend hockey games and concerts.

Photo courtesy of Immersive Media Corp.
The IMC Worldview's spherical camera coverage.

"Our first customers were those three-letter agencies in Washington," says Myles McGovern, president and CEO of Calgary-based Immersive Media Corp. (IMC). "And nobody was supposed to talk about that."

Lips have loosened a bit now, and if you look closely at one of the company's brochures, there's a photo of a police car at the 2005 U.S. presidential inauguration. It's equipped with IMC's special spherical camera, which not only captures images in all directions; it also encodes the pictures with highly accurate GPS positional and inertial data.

This car shadowed the president's vehicle in the motorcade and provided authorities with live monitoring.

It was also used to make a complete street-level scan of the parade route, allowing officers to quietly rehearse the whole operation from the comfort of a computer.

"I can certainly see immediate applications in training and in the security industry," says Richard Levy, a professor in the faculty of environmental design at the University of Calgary and an expert in the capture and use of digital images.

McGovern confirms that he's already recorded video of Toronto's Eaton Centre, hoping to convince the owners to use the IMC's system for security. With the cameras currently costing about US$100,000 each, there's still some work to be done there.

IMC has started an initiative to capture complete street-level views of 25 major U.S. cities. McGovern notes that they drive specially outfitted Volkswagens up and down all the streets, then fill in the gaps, like New York's Central Park, with backpack-mounted units. (There are demos of this on the company's website.) He says people wave at the funny-looking camera, which looks like a black softball perched on a soda can. If they're too annoying, they can be edited out of the images.

"Our guys carry a letter from the municipality explaining what they're doing," he laughs, "but that didn't stop them from getting pulled over and told to put their hands on the hood in Washington, D.C."

Driving a VW Beetle with a high-tech gizmo on the roof is apparently a no-no in the terrorist-spooked District of Columbia.

McGovern says he first looked at the company in 1994. He stayed in touch with company founder David McCutchen, now IMC's chief technology officer, who had filed patents in this area as far back as 1989.

Photo courtesy of Immersive Media Corp.
The traditional single-lens view of a school hallway can't compare to the IMC Worldview's spherical camera coverage.

McGovern says that the idea was "ahead of its time," and that it took a decade for components like hard disks to become fast and cheap enough to capture the images. "When we're driving, we grab two gigabytes a minute," he says. "However, we can compress that down so that it can be streamed over the Internet."

Levy says the key question will be how they will distribute their "impressive" images, and get people to pay for them.

He says the IMC's technology would be a natural fit for Google Earth, which currently only allows you to zoom in on cities from above.

"If they have New York City or Chicago captured, then it makes sense to make it available through Google Earth. That allows you to distribute it easily, and Google has hundreds of millions of users that you can spread the cost over."

McGovern agrees that licensing the company's "GeoImmersive Imagery" collection is the way to go, and notes that on Jan. 9, the company announced a multi-year agreement with a major corporate customer to license a substantial portion of the GeoImmersive image inventory.

Pressed for the name of that customer, McGovern remains coy, saying he doesn't want to steal the other company's thunder. But he expects that announcement within the next 90 days.

In the meantime, corporate users such as Mike Krasman, operations vice-president of Edmonton-based Universal Surveys, are using the IMC technology on the job.

"It's an excellent tool," he says. "It saves a lot of money for clients. We pick the optimal surveyed route for pipelines and we use that technology to film the route and then present it to our client."

The client can then do desktop planning while slurping a cappuccino, instead of having to struggle to notice something from a noisy helicopter. "It eliminates a whole bunch of people in an office having to go out and look at things and make decisions," adds Krasman.

"We can bring all that stuff back to them in a digital format and show 360-degree images of key points along the pipeline."

Krasman estimates that on a 100-km project, this technology saves about $50,000. "You're eliminating helicopter time at $1,300 an hour, and consultants' time. If you're out for two or three days with four or five guys, it adds up pretty quickly."

He adds his company helped IMC develop a tool to allow the data to be displayed with grid maps.

Krasman predicts the next application may be "on projects such as the Mackenzie pipeline, to get a tighter bid on construction."

He also finds the images useful in resolving disputes with landowners, by taking "before and after" videos. "We always get into fights where people say we've disrupted things and if we can prove that we haven't, then there's nothing to fix."

The technology may also move from corporate boardrooms to the boards of hockey rinks. McGovern says he's in discussion with some NHL teams to allow you to be your own cameraman for hockey games. Video gaming possibilities abound.

Levy muses about combining real scenery with computer-generated characters and projecting simulated three-dimensional images on a large screen, like a Star Trek holodeck.

He also envisions an America's Cup race where there are cameras on every boat and you can basically run your own virtual race.

If IMC gets its way, we might not have to worry about the high price of tickets to prime Olympic events in Vancouver in 2010. The real best seats may be the virtual ones, in our home theatres.

Web Watch: www.immersivemedia.com (Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)