Microsoft: With a new perspective against Street View

Developers rely on panorama view for better navigation

Microsoft's research arm is working to make Google's Street View more competitive with new perspectives. According to the argumentation of the researchers, both the in-house streetside for Bing Maps and the Google counterpart have the same weakness: The 360-degree views form isolated "bubbles". They cannot give an optimal impression of long roads, for example. That should now change with "Street Slide".

The researchers combine images of individual locations to form a long panorama. Users can view this from a distance or move virtually through the city by scrolling. This interface promises a more captivating user experience, reports the team at the current SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference http://www.siggraph.org/s2010.

New perspective
With traditional 360-degree views, a user can zoom in on an object, but not actually get close to it. That changes with Street Slide, as a YouTube demo video shows. To do this, an elongated panorama is assembled from parts of the 360-degree images. The user scrolls in this view to move along the road. In the panorama, information about points of interest is displayed below the image. This also applies to indications of side streets. {jumi [plugins/content/jumi/newsgrafik.php]}
This perspective makes it easier for users to find objects of interest. If you want to take a closer look, you can zoom out of the street slide panorama directly into the appropriate 360-degree view. In a usability study with 20 test persons, Street Slide enabled them to find destinations in Seattle more easily and quickly than with Google Street View. "That can have a big impact on mobile devices," project employee Michael Cohen told Technology Review with conviction.


Long roads
In its current form, Street Slide works best for long, straight streets with building facades in one level. This makes the approach suitable, for example, for many small US towns that are very much oriented towards a main street. In the following, however, the researchers want to look for optimizations in order to compose panoramas with as little image artifacts as possible, even in the case of more complex streets.
For the time being, Street Slide is purely a research project. Microsoft has not yet given any details as to whether and when the view should be integrated into Bing Maps.
The street slide demo on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktdhOv8E5lo

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