( CNN ) -- Between GPS devices on your car 's dashboard and digital maps of almost any locale in the world on your smartphone or laptop , it 's hard to get lost these days . Each orange Tele Atlas mapping van has six cameras , two side-sweeping lasers and a GPS on its roof . We may take these 21st-century services for granted . But someone still needs to do the actual legwork of mapping these places and making sure the information is accurate . Meet the people at Tele Atlas , the company that provides so-called `` base maps '' to such high-profile clients as Google , MapQuest and RIM , the maker of the BlackBerry . Tele Atlas also provides digital-mapping services for its corporate owner , the portable-navigation company TomTom . You ca n't say the company is n't ambitious . `` Our ultimate goal would be to map the entire world , '' says Pat McDevitt , vice president of engineering at Tele Atlas , which is based in the Netherlands and has its U.S. headquarters in Lebanon , New Hampshire . Base maps are the raw data -- highways , streets , stop lights and exit signs -- that navigation companies use as a starting point before adding their own applications . Most of the industrialized world has been base-mapped already . But Tele Atlas is constantly updating pre-existing maps to include new roads , traffic signals and buildings . Tele Atlas gets this information by combining satellite imagery , local , state and federal maps and most importantly , putting the rubber to the road in its Mobile Mapping Vans . See how it works » . Pimp my ride . Six cameras , two side-sweeping lasers and a GPS sit atop each bright orange Mobile Mapping Van , making them , as McDevitt says , `` look a little bit like something out of 'Ghostbusters . ' `` The cameras point in all directions , capturing a 360-degree view of everything the van encounters . And the GPS lets Tele Atlas know -- within a meter -- everywhere the van has been . A computer screen sits next to the driver 's seat so the driver can monitor images captured by the cameras above . `` The driver is really responsible for making sure the images coming from the camera are actually of high enough quality to be used on our production floor , '' says Kamron Barron , technical process manager at Tele Atlas . That means when a bug splatters on a camera 's lens , the driver gets out to clean it off . This happens a lot . And if you think the vans must poke along , causing traffic jams on the roads they 're mapping , you 'd be wrong . The vans drive at normal speeds while snapping about three images per second . That 's more than 100 million images per year , per van . When you consider Tele Atlas has dozens of vans worldwide , you begin to get a sense of the scope of the company 's work . `` We have about 200 countries for which we have good navigable street maps , and that 's expanding on a monthly basis , '' says McDevitt . Tele Atlas is constantly discovering parts of the world that have never been digitally mapped , he says . Instead of bench seats and fidgeting kids , Mobile Mapping Vans hold a metal cabinet with two hard drives . After about two weeks of crisscrossing everything from major highways to small country roads , the hard drives get full . One gets sent to awaiting Tele Atlas cartographers and analysts ; the other stays with the driver as a backup . At Tele Atlas headquarters in New Hampshire , analysts pore over the data for updates and inconsistencies : changes in roads , speed limits and even how many lanes are on a highway . Once confirmed , the changes make their way into Tele Atlas software and eventually to cell phones , navigation systems and home computers . Base maps are updated every few months . Mapping goes 3-D . Images collected by the vans ' cameras do n't make it to the public because Tele Atlas does n't have an application like Google Street View . But it soon may have something that 's arguably even better . That brings us to the vans ' side-sweeping lasers . As the vans drive , their lasers constantly scan the road and everything around it , recording information that Tele Atlas calls the `` first reflective surface . '' This includes the width , height and contours of every building the van passes . This data , when combined with the images captured by the cameras , will help Tele Atlas create a 3-D world . Three-dimensional digital maps already are common in Japan and Western Europe . But 3-D maps are still in their primitive stages in the U.S. , where their quality depends on the type of device they 're displayed on . Cell phones might show gray amorphous blocks representing buildings . A laptop might show more detailed buildings with doors and windows . Within 18 months , Tele Atlas hopes to develop a powerful navigation system whose images will look almost identical to the surroundings through which we travel . `` It 's a virtual reality experience for that customer , '' says McDevitt . `` As they go around , the buildings match , the roads match , the entire navigation experience matches what they would find in the real world . '' In other words , we soon may have even less of an excuse for getting lost .
CNN goes behind-the-scenes at Tele Atlas , which does digital mapping . The company crisscrosses the globe in vans with cameras , lasers and GPS . Tele Atlas creates `` base maps '' for Google , MapQuest and others . Next step will be to combine lasers and camera images to make detailed 3-D maps .