Remember the first time you used Google
Street View? Amazing, right? Thing is, traversing a busy urban street in a 360-degree photographic bubble can be disorienting, especially when searching for a specific address or business. So check this: Microsoft Research has developed a rather nifty solution it calls Street Slide. Zoom out of your panoramic bubble and the street is presented as a dynamic, multi-perspective "strip" giving you an instant visual summary of the surroundings -- similar to viewing the entire street from a distance. Fortunately, Microsoft took advantage of what would otherwise be the unused letterboxed screen above and below the strip to add navigational and informational aids like clickable business logos and building numbers. Pretty impressive, and Microsoft is already working on taking Street Slide mobile with an iPhone port, and no doubt a version for the upcoming Windows Phone 7 series of devices. Unfortunately, don't expect this to be released anytime soon as the team has only processed about 2400 panoramas so far covering just 4 kilometers of streets. Check the video after the break, you'll be glad you did.
posted July 28th 2010 2:03AM
@Wiigee
I used to love Google but they're taking on too many new markets and they're losing the lead in their core products. This is the kind of thing Google should have been years ahead of MS on.
As far as making this available for Android and iPhone--developers are going to go where the money is and that's not Android.
@AndreRichards i think their core products have been doing fine.
The money from this will likely come from advertising in the app. As cool as this is, google maps is free, unless M$ is stupid, this will be too. The biggest phone OS's are iOS and Android, if you really think there is no money in whats probably the second most popular phone OS, you really dont understand anything about business.
I haven't been that impressed in a long time. I am truly amazed.
Great job MS!
do like, but the transition from image to image is pretty jarring. i can't seem to dig up a link at the moment, but i would love to see this combined with the technology that meshes multiple images from different perspectives together to create a 3d scene. seems like the next logical step to make this thing over-the-top awesome. in any case, wasn't microsoft in on that, too?
@paradoxharbinger That's Photosynth. It's being used quite a bit in Streetside already.
@paradoxharbinger : What you are looking at is most likely a side project / product from Photosynth. That is part of why it is so jarring. Looks like they tweaked the algorithm for a flat view.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but there's no way around it. This is jaw-dropping amazing! This blows Google Maps out of the water. I already thought Google street view was more novelty than a truly useful tool and this finally turns that concept into something useful. I could see making a lot of use out of this. The old Google (you know, before they started trying to be Apple and Facebook) would have been on this way ahead of MS.
@AndreRichards Ok, I'm a bit of an MS fanboy recently (I can't help it, the last few years has produced really solid products that I like)... I've found that MS develops all these cool ideas way before competitors, but takes sooooooooooo long to bring them to market that the competition gets there first. someone needs to smack em around.
Oh courier, where art thou?
And I thought you couldn't get any better than street view.
Bing Maps just keeps on outclassing Google Maps technically. Now if they could only improve their actual maps. :)
Oh holy crap, gimme this on a Windows Phone 7!
What I don't get is why they don't take their streetside panoramas and bird's-eye photos, throw them into photosynth to get a point cloud, turn that into a 3D model, then paint the pictures onto that. Change the textures on the model so that when you get closer it uses a picture taken closer (like the texture resolution increases as you get closer in video games).
this could provide seamless motion in all dimensions, avoids the artifacts that we see here and doesn't restrict you to stay on the street or at the origin of the pictures. Would kick the explitives out of google maps.
anybody else hoping for MS Research Hub apps?
I want it now!
Say Hello to another use of Seadragon & Photosynth. Yay!