And another point for Microsoft in the web race! You better start worrying Google ’cause Msoft is showing quite a few important “innovations” lately and if playing catch up with Bing wasn’t scary enough now you have to start worrying about maps!…
Msoft just unveiled today “Street Slide“… a project by their research arm with Johannes Kopf, Billy Chen, Richard Szeliski and Michael F. Cohen as its main stakeholders. Summarized as “A multi-perspective street slide panorama with navigational aides and mini-map”.
Systems such as Google Street View and Bing Maps Streetside enable users to virtually visit cities by navigating between immersive 360° panoramas, or bubbles. The discrete moves from bubble to bubble enabled in these systems do not provide a good visual sense of a larger aggregate such as a whole city block. Multi-perspective “strip” panoramas can provide a visual summary of a city street but lack the full realism of immersive panoramas.
Street Slide combines the best aspects of the immersive nature of bubbles with the overview provided by multiperspective strip panoramas. We demonstrate a seamless transition between bubbles and multi-perspective panoramas…. sexy… and useful!!! We still don’t know when it will be released (if ever) publicly but we’re pretty impressed. For when Google street slide?
