14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has been very bullish with its web ventures and has been investing a lot of money to compete with Google on its home turf, search, maps and so on. It has made some progress with Bing, not enough to make a significant dent, but it a step in the right direction. Now it’s working on one-upping another Google product, Street View. Still in the early stages, Microsoft has unveiled a new way of viewing street level imagery, dubbed Street Slide.
Unveiled at the SIGGRAPH 2010 computer graphics conference in Los Angeles, Street Slide is an innovative way of using 360 degree street imagery by enabling users to get a perspective and panoramic view of a street. Images are stitched together in a way that presents users with the side of an entire street. Probably the best way to understand it is to watch the video.
Google’s Street View and Microsoft existing Streetside features use multiple images to create a 360-degree view. The images are combined in a way which allows users to circle around, zoom and move from one position to the other. But all the time they’re still stuck in the same ‘bubble.’ With Street Slide, users can step out of the bubble to see a sideline view. It uses the same images but it’s a much better way to get a sense of perspective and to move around a city.
This view leaves a lot of unused space on the top and on the bottom, but the Microsoft team has utilized it by placing additional information like street signs and business information and also navigational buttons. At this stage, this is just research technology and there are no official plans to include it in Bing Maps. But you can be sure that once the technology is good enough to work on the scale it needs to, Microsoft will make it a standard feature.