Microsoft Research demonstrated a new street-level image viewing option that knocks the socks off of Google Maps Street View this week at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles. Called Street Slide, the technology allows users to zoom out from the fish-eye pannable photos you see on standard street view options and instead see a series of flat panoramic photos stitched together like a timeline.
It’s a little hard to describe, but check out the video below. In addition to being less disorienting than zooming around inside Street View, the open space opened up for annotation in Street Slide is very nice.
Doesn’t that just make you feel like a whole new world of possibilities are opened up? There’s no word whether or when this feature will be added to Bing, but if it is – I’m going to try to train myself to use Bing Maps instead of Google Maps.
Blogger Keir Clarke hacked together some proof of concept demos similar to this yesterday, using Google Maps, photoshop and jQuery. They’re not bad for a few hours of work!
From these sorts of experiments to the work of Open Heat Map and Tableau that we’ve highlighted here, it’s exciting to think about where all this malleability of maps could lead.
