While Google Maps has become the de-facto online mapping service for address searching and driving directions, its Street View feature is arguably underutilized--especially considering how much resources go into producing Street View panoramas. I find myself using Street View when I want to take a peek at an address I'm about to visit, zooming in for a photographic glimpse and then zooming back out, never
exploring location outside of the 360 degree panoramic bubble.
Microsoft Research wants to change that. At this year's SIGGRAPH conference, Redmond researchers presented a paper showing their vision for the future of Streetside (Bing's version of Google Street View). Called
Street Slide, this system aggregates all the photos from 360 degree bubbles and stitches neighboring images into long panoramas. The full stretch of road along one street becomes one long image that you can now pan across, so you're not limited to one fixed perspective. Of course, you'll be able to zoom into individual positions to get the traditional 360 degree view, but the ability to zoom out and scan one stretch of street offers a level of freedom that makes exploration enjoyable and useful. You really have to watch the demo video to get a sense for how intuitive this system really is.
Street Slide seems to be a logical implementation of Microsoft's Seadragon technology they're already using in Bing Maps Beta, along with an extension of its Photosynth collaborative geo-tagging photo project. It's great to see innovation coming from Microsoft's camp that's more than just
visual gimmicks; hopefully Street Slide will get the opportunity to move beyond the research paper domain and actually turn into a Bing feature.
Watch the video demo of Street Slide below.
