Redmond, Washington — Software maker Microsoft Corp. is showing its might with its latest venture to compete with search engine giant Google’s popular Street View service, apparently plans to launch a mapping service later this year with its own application dubbed GeoSynth, according to reports.
Google Street View has been both celebrated and criticized among the masses since it launched two years ago in the United States, and later it has been rolled out to other countries around the world, with the UK and the Netherlands the two most recent additions.
For those totally nescient about what Google Street View is or does, a byproduct of Google Maps which, as the name suggests, allows users the chance to zoom into a location and see it from street level.
And now Microsoft seems to attempt to try something similar, but unlike Google’s imagery which is collected by a fleet of sensor-equipped cars with 360 degree view cameras and laser range-finders driving the highways and byways of the world, Microsoft is going to find its images from someone else, namely, you.
However, the GeoSynth service, which will not go live until later this year, will use high-definition photos taken by members of the public, and overlay it on Microsoft’s Virtual Earth mapping service and its PhotoSynth technology. It could allow users to get a street-level view of almost anywhere in the world.
It was magnificently used during Barack Obama’s inauguration to create a 3D representation of the moment when the President took the oath of office by ‘stitching’ together photos taken at a set time by members of the public standing in a variety of vantage points.
The Microsoft service will empower users to upload geo-tagged snaps into a central database, which will be incorporated to build a detailed, larger picture of an area or landmark.
“The system would take the best images from a location to create a single image of a specific landmark very much in the same way Microsoft did with the Obama inauguration,” Johannes Kebeck a Virtual Earth technology specialist at Microsoft, said in a statement.
“We could not guarantee that all images would be used, but you could create a very good image of a given landmark like Piccadilly Circus, for example, from thousands of images.”
PhotoSynth, if you have not seen it, is a pretty remarkable piece of tech that rolled out of Microsoft’s Live Labs run by Gary Flake.
Check it out in the video below — it is undeniably impressive.