According to TreeHugger.com:
“This week, Google began traversing the rivers and villages of the world's largest rainforest, armed with special imaging equipment, for its latest undertaking: Street View in the Amazon.”

Sounds like great fun- and I can hardly wait to virtually visit the Amazon- if only they scanned using Ecosynth at the same time…

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/08/google-begins-mapping-for-street-view-in-the-amazon.php

3D scanning just keeps getting better (but not cheaper!).

A post from Engadget: Topcon's IP-S2 Lite (~$300K) creates panoramic maps in 3D, spots every bump in the road (video) http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/28/topcons-ip-s2-lite-creates-panoramic-maps-in-3d-spots-every-bu/.

More from Topcon:

http://www.topconpositioning.com/products/mobile-mapping/ip-s2

http://global.topcon.com/news/20091204-4285.html

In China recently, we had the good fortune to collaborate in using a wonderful new ground-based (terrestrial) LiDAR scanner (TLS) from Riegl: The VZ-400, which fuzes LiDAR scans with images acquired from a digital camera (~$140K). Pictured at left- graduate students of the Chinese Academy of Forestry with us in the field- literally!

Wow!  This from http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-01/24/3d-kinect-map 

“Noted Kinect-tinkerer Martin Szarski has used a car, a laptop, an Android smartphone and the aforementioned Xbox 360 peripheral to make a DIY-equivalent of Google Street View….  All he needs to do is drive down his street, as the Kinect, laptop and Android team log a series of colour images, 3D point clouds and global positions into a collection of data points. Throw those into a custom-made program, and voila; you have a 3D model of your street, and its geo-tagged for easy placement on an map like Google Earth.”

It looks like we had better get a Kinect for the Lab!