14 DAY TRIAL // Although Microsoft only released Streetside on Bing Maps at the start of December 2009, the technology was initially introduced over 2.5 years before, via a technology preview of Live Search Maps. In the video embedded at the bottom of this article, users will be able to see Chris Pendleton, the Bing Maps technical evangelist for Microsoft, together with Bing Maps Program Manager Pasquale DeMaio discussing the details of Bing Maps’ Streetside.
“As we continue to roll out more and more Streetside imagery for Bing Maps, I figured it was time to give my technical peeps out there a little sneak peek into how we create the Streetside user experience for Bing Maps. For those of you who don’t know, Streetside is the term for Bing Maps’ ground level, human scale imagery that is highly coveted for bringing users the full visual experience for a specific location,” Pendleton stated.
Streetside only became a fully fledged feature of Bing Maps with the Beta release of the Redmond company’s mapping, search and location platform, which went live last December. Essentially, Microsoft slapped a Silverlight UI on top of Bing Maps, but it was the alternative to Adobe Flash that allowed for a new user experience in terms of the service. As far as Streetside is concerned, the new Bing Maps features rely heavily on the 3D capabilities introduced in Silverlight 3.
“While our satellite imagery and orthographic aerial photography (Aerial map style) provide great context to accompany our vector-based raster maps (Road map style) and our oblique imagery (Bird’s Eye map style) is even higher resolution for increased zoom and cardinal rotation capabilities, Streetside brings you down to ground level (and you can go inside with Photosynth,” Pendleton added.
Check out the video below to see the work that goes into capturing, processing and delivering Streetside content to users. Pendleton reveals that the discussion with DeMaio will touch topics such as how the company uses “Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) with photography (Photogrammetric processing) through a Silverlight interface and vector road information for reference points.”