Microsoft Street Slide

Street Slide, a future rival wide-angle Google Street View

A team of researchers from Microsoft unveiled at Siggraph the possible successor Streetside, tool photographic exploration of Bing Maps. Use? Allow to zoom out to see the entire street.

After Google Street View, Street Slide? Microsoft has already built a system to Bing exploration through photography of city streets, called Streetside, a little more powerful than Google but far less dense - it does not, for example France. Now, he is already imagining the next version.

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Slide Street, presented at Siggraph 2010 and developed by Microsoft Research labs, pushes a little further the concept of geographic navigation by photos.

The idea is simple: when Street View Streetside or simply to show partial views of the streets one after another to simulate your movement, Street Slide suggest you take a little distance and see a picture of the full track where you are. "Navigating the photo collections Streetside or Google Street View is laborious and returned to find a specific location on foot should walk along the street, looking around you, until you find the location you want, "says the paper Microsoft researchers [PDF].

With Street Slide over problem by zooming out, you get a view of the entire street that you're exploring. Just then click where you want to go there immediately (see video below). The presentation of a street in a long panorama has other advantages, highlighted by the researchers: it leaves the site including the top and bottom of the screen to display additional information (shops, street numbers, etc..)

Very interesting, this experience is not nearly as long to appear in Bing Maps. Because if Microsoft researchers have actually developed a functional prototype, it does currently only 4 km of track: six blocks and eight intersections in Seattle ...