Microsoft Street Slide Bursts Google Street View’s Bubble

I’ve definitely found Google’s Street View very useful for virtually walking to venues from train stations in the hope that I don’t get hideously lost. Thankfully with the Street View/GPS combo it hasn’t happened – yet.

Well, Microsoft Research wants to push this tech further and have taken the street-view idea and developed a new perspective.

Yup – get a load of the seamless view and how lovely it feels to be freed from the bubbley perspective of Street View.

The new Microsoft prototype shows the user zooming in and then zooming out til you get the panoramic strip view 🙂

When you’ve zoomed out and get that strip the plan is to fill those black areas with store-front logos and address details – making it even easier to find that bank, coffee shop or venue. I wonder if there’ll be advertising/special deals attached to these as well? 😉

Street Slide seems to give you better perspective of the buildings on the street and also offers more detail than you get in the Google bubble.

The research paper mentions 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”.

I am genuinely impressed with what I’ve seen so far and can’t wait to try it out – best news of all is that Microsoft are planning an iPhone version 🙂

Hopefully nobody’s data has been swiped in the making of this 😉