Pirate Treasure Maps Just One Way Bing Differentiating Itself from Google Maps

Google Maps set the bar for feature-rich online navigation services, with its open API and useful features. Microsoft's Bing is trying to jump over that bar. Bing has just launched Destination Maps, an expansion to its Google Maps-like navigation service that renders easy-to-follow route maps when plotting a destination.  
 
Instead of showing an area map and superimposing a route on top of it, the Silverlight powered Destination Maps renders a new map specifically designed to find your destination. It cuts away the side streets and unnecessary routes and introduces a much more direct view of the area. It can render the map in four different ways, producing a conventional "American" or "European"-style street map, or a casually hand-sketched map, or a novelty treasure map. 

Destination Maps rendered a remarkably simple map to Rockefeller Center, reducing Manhattan's myriad streets to a simple box enclosed by 34th street, 57th street, 8th avenue, and 2nd avenue. By ignoring side streets, it produced a simple and accurate map that shows the reader how to get to their destination using the area's main thoroughfares. 
 
This is just one of the many ways Microsoft's Bing team has tried to differentiate itself from Google's dominating Maps service. 
 
One of the coolest technologies you'll only find in Bing is Microsoft's Seadragon Deep Zoom technology. Deep Zoom allows Bing Maps to seamlessly and smoothly switch from a large, drawn map view, to an isometric bird's eye photo map, to a more detailed overhead photographic view, depending on the zoom level. For high-traffic and tourist-notable areas, Bing Maps also offers a Streetside view similar to Google Maps' Street View, a pedestrian's-eye view of an area. Unlike Google Maps' relatively basic 360-degree panorama photos, Destination Maps renders the street-level view to fit the contours of the buildings, superimposing photos onto approximate shapes of objects so the animation of navigating the streets looks more real. As part of this rendered panorama system, Destination Maps also offers Photosynths of certain locations. Photosynths are collections of photos arranged in a pseudo-3D perspective, offering much more detail of specific objects than the basic Streetside view. 
 
Bing Maps is also offering more conventional functionality, with several Map Apps similar to Google Maps hacks. They include a Gas Prices App that shows how much gas costs at nearby stations, a Parking Finder App that shows where various garages are located, and even a Roadside Sculptures App that shows weird things you can see on the side of the road. 
 
These features look very impressive, but they have their own share of issues. Destination Maps took several minutes to render a map to Rockefeller Center. The Streetside view displays extremely jarring contrasts between locations, snapping and shifting between reference photos abruptly. Photosynths are even worse, relying on a much less standardized system of taking photos that can cause the view to jump wildly between different perspectives. When they work well, they work very well, though. 
 
Microsoft is clearly working very hard on making Bing Maps into a formidable competitor to Google Maps. With its broad and creative functionality, it might just do that.
 
[via Dvice]