Redmond, Washington — Leaving privacy issues aside, it is hard to grumble too much about products like Bing Streetside and Google Street View, considering such products has long wowed users with its option to view the road inside a 360-degree panorama. But of late, the geniuses over at Microsoft Research have taken the street-view idea within Google and Bing Maps and developed a next-generation mapping tool, dubbed “Street Slide,” which promises to up the ante in several ways to street-level data.
Software maker Microsoft Research’s current endeavor, which is being demonstrated at this week’s Siggraph computer graphics conference, approaches viewing streets from a different direction. Literally.
Rather than being trapped within a “bubble” perspective of captured imagery to the next, as is done in Google’s StreetView and Microsoft’s Streetside, the new technology, called “Street Slide,” blends together multiple panoramas into one, large strip that users are able to scroll through side to side. The Microsoft mock-up shows off a zooming out function, where you can see the street your viewing on a panoramic level.
First, consider the jumpy nature of current offerings: Street Slide’s approach is to split images into a continuous strip, providing an unbroken look. Also, because the picture is somewhat zoomed-out, Street Slide provides a better perspective of streets as a whole. Furthermore, in place of putting information overlays on the imagery itself, things like street signs and business information are placed below, and out of sight of what was captured.
Street Slide basically provides people with a panorama of a street, enabling fast, easier and quicker navigation along a chosen path through the multiple images that make it up, whilst taking in more detail than is possible with the bubble mode.
The final outcome is something that lets users glance over long stretches of street, as if they were looking out the window of a moving vehicle, then stopping to get out and look around, once they have reached any one particular spot within the series. It is a 2D view, as opposed to the 3D bubble of a regular Street View caption, but it delivers a good comprehensive viewpoints of a street. Better still, you can transition from Street Slide to Street View (and back) practically instantly anytime, so there should be no loss of direction and location.
“As the user slides sideways, the multi-viewpoint panorama is constructed and rendered dynamically to simulate either a perspective or hyper-perspective view. This provides a strong sense of parallax, which adds to the immersion. We call this form of sliding sideways while looking at a street façade a street slide. Finally we integrate annotations and a mini-map within the user interface to provide geographic information as well additional gifts for navigation.”
Because the view becomes narrow when zoomed out, there are black spaces that appear at the top and bottom. Microsoft’s idea is to fill these areas with clickable store-front logos and/or address details may also be presented, and users would probably welcome them, again making it easier to see exactly where you (virtually) are.
The research paper, which can be read in its entirety in PDF form, describes that only “2400 panoramas covering about 4 kilometres on 6 streets with 8 intersections” has been covered so far, but that the plan is “integrating our viewer into a larger database containing millions of bubbles of street level imagery”.
Then here is one more interesting fact: According to Michael Cohen, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, informed Tom Simonite that people who opted to link Street Slide to a social network might even be able to see the locations of their opted-in friends.
This is the first major development within street data technology that we have been genuinely impressed with since we picked our jaw up off of the floor after seeing Google’s street-view. The team behind Street Slide is currently working on a snapshot of the application for Apple’s iPhone but did not provide a time line for it.
Meanwhile, just take a quick glance at how it works in the video below: