Redmond, Washington — Software monopolist Microsoft today unveiled an improved version of its Streetside feature for Bing Maps search engine, rendering the view with more continuity when users move up or down a road, thus earning some credit for at least taking a different approach than Google’s Street View.
The Redmond Vole has significantly improved its street-level images in Bing Maps, rendering the view with more continuity when users move up or down a road. The humongous change is the weeding out of the 360-degree “bubble” view in favor of an approach that flattens out the images into a long horizontal strip for browsing quickly up and down the street.
“In the past you toured Streetside imagery by navigating between ‘bubbles,’ or discrete 360 degree views, and moving down the street was accomplished by jumping from bubble to bubble,” wrote Microsoft official Chris Pendleton in a blog post. This works, but makes it difficult for you to comprehend for a larger area like a city block. Besides, it is hard to pick out storefronts farther away since you really only see the ones directly perpendicular to your viewpoint with great clarity.
“With these enhancements you can quickly and conveniently pan the neighborhood, check out a business down the block, or make a ‘u-turn’ to cross the street, among other things,” a Bing representative said in a statement. “So whether you need to see a straight, flat area in New York, or a steep, winding road in San Francisco, your online mapping experience is more immersive than ever.”
Apart from this smoother sideways-panning navigation, the Streetside interface now has a strip at the top that displays a map image indicating the block being viewed and a strip at the bottom with information like street names, business listings, bus stops and storefronts. The street flows by as a series of smooth ground-level photographs so now you simply pan up and down the street to see the neighborhood and find what you are looking for.
The technology has emerged from a project at the Microsoft research unit called Street Slide. It works only on desktop browsers.
Once a novelty, street-level images have revolutionized into a popular feature in Bing and Google, used by millions to get a better sense of what a street looks like from the perspective of a pedestrian or a driver. These ground-level images enhance the user experience of people using Bing Maps and Google Maps to obtain driving directions, and make these search engines’ business-listings data more visually attractive.
“These alterations represent a significant enhancement for desktop browsers, enabling you to quickly pan up and down the street to see the neighborhood and find businesses,” explains Bing’s Pendleton. “We are doing this by providing street level panoramas so you can take a virtual walk through the streets with a view of locations and landmarks. As you slide the street level imagery sideways, the view of the sidewalk is seamlessly constructed including an overlay of business listings, street names and store fronts.”
Explore the feature at Bing Maps and click on the little blue person at the top of the frame and enjoy Streetside.