HERE's looking at you -- in 3-D

BERKELEY, Calif. -- John Ristevski's ride always gets attention on the street. People are bound to stop and stare at a bright blue station wagon with $80,000 worth of electronics mounted on its roof and a map of the world affixed to its side.

"It's the Google Maps car," one woman said to a friend this month as the pair walked past Ristevski's office, a few blocks from the University of California's campus.

Not quite. Ristevski works not for Google but for HERE, the maps division of Finnish telecom company Nokia. And the technology-laded wagon that he developed is playing a key role in helping automakers such as BMW and Daimler keep pace with Google in the field of self-driving vehicles.

HERE has deployed about 200 of these vehicles to build 3-D maps that could be refined into maps for autonomous driving. Over the past 18 months, they have mapped more than a million miles of roads in 30 countries on six continents, drawing new partners such as Mercedes-Benz and Continental AG, which see Nokia's maps as key to their self-driving technology.

"I think we have unique capabilities even compared to Google," Ristevski, the 38-year-old head of reality capture and processing at HERE, said in an interview at his office here.

"Google definitely has advanced technologies that they're deploying, and I think there's a potential that they could get into the space. But our other traditional competitors -- like TomTom -- are a long, long way behind."

It might seem strange for a map company to play such a key role in the development of self-driving vehicles. After all, a map cannot detect the vehicle swerving into the wrong lane, or a child who runs into the street chasing a ball.

But 3-D maps know what the cameras and sensors fitted on a vehicle are supposed to see as they drive down the road, making it easier to analyze unusual situations and steer accordingly.

This is why Google, which jolted the auto industry by revealing in 2010 that it is developing self-driving vehicles, has compiled about 2,000 miles of 3-D maps, covering its hometown of Mountain View, Calif., and many California highways.

There's a catch, though. Google won't sell its maps.

So car companies are relying instead on Nokia, which became a player in mapping by acquiring Navteq in 2008 and rebranding it as HERE in 2012.

Last year, Mercedes showed its progress by having an S500 sedan drive itself 62 miles from Mannheim to Pforzheim, Germany. It replicated a drive that Bertha Benz, the wife of inventor Karl Benz, navigated in 1888 to prove that the automobile her husband had invented in 1886 actually worked.

HERE's mapping vehicles had come by and mapped every stop sign and streetlight on the route, making up for the shortcomings of existing tools, such as GPS.

"GPS is a military-based system," Thomas Weber, Mercedes' board member for r&d, told reporters at the time, "but only for the military is it really precise."

HERE promises that its maps are accurate to within 20 centimeters, or about 8 inches, thanks to high-resolution digital cameras, a laser-based radar system called lidar, a GPS receiver and equipment that tracks vehicle yaw, pitch and roll.

Ristevski, the architect of this system, ended up at HERE because of his work at Earthmine, a Berkeley startup that he co-founded in 2006 after getting his Ph.D. at the University of California. He said he and co-founder Anthony Fassero were obsessed with the idea of building 3-D maps -- "indexing reality," they called it.

They had the idea of using these maps to preserve historical sites such as Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado. But most of the early business came from cities such as Oakland, Calif. The city had installed pedestrian ramps on city streets without keeping track of them, Ristevski said, and came to Earthmine asking for a map so it could maintain them.

Then, in 2012, Nokia acquired Earthmine.

Now, instead of rendering roads as spider webs of intersecting lines, HERE breaks them down into lanes with spatial boundaries -- curbs and lane markings. It keeps track of lane curvature and slope, and signals such as stop signs and traffic lights.

Ogi Redzic, vice president of connected driving at HERE, said in an interview this summer that by 2018 or so, the company plans to build a high-definition map database for highways in the U.S. and Europe.

Fully autonomous vehicles that can drive an entire journey probably will not be ready by then, but car companies plan to start launching semiautonomous systems that can handle highway driving.

"We're going to map the countries where the first rollouts are going to happen," Redzic said. "You really have to launch at limited scale and then learn a little bit."

Inside the office in Berkeley, Ristevski and his co-workers can keep an eye on the progress of this goal from a screen about eight feet wide. At any given moment, they can see which of their drivers are driving, and how much ground they've covered.

On a recent late afternoon, the drivers in Australia and the U.S. West Coast were still working, so their cars showed up green on HERE's command center. The drivers in Europe, Africa and continental Asia were done for the day.

In the Midwest, the drivers showed up blue, which meant they were commuting home. Still others showed up in teal, which meant that a driver was down for unscheduled reasons -- perhaps out sick.

Self-driving vehicles are the ultimate goal of the program, but for HERE's purposes, drivers will be needed for the foreseeable future, Ristevski said. Someone needs to wipe the camera lens clean when an insect runs afoul of the mapping vehicle, and fix the innumerable other complex situations that might arise.

But Ristevski said he can imagine a fleet of driverless vehicles traveling the world, mapping the streets, never stopping for a cup of coffee, never sleeping and never calling in sick.

"It would be a natural fit," Ristev-ski said. "No more teal."