Everyone has played with StreetView, searching out their current homes (or even their childhood homes) and other cool landmarks (I’ve even explored a small town in Japan as well as Rome, just for the fun of it). However, inching along and manoeuvring your views can be incredibly frustrating and tedious. So Microsoft has come up with an interesting alternative: Street Slide.
Instead of seeing things within a confined space, like on StreetView, users can look at an entire “strip” of street, making address-hunting a lot easier. They can aim and change the viewpoint of the camera, and the new program even goes as far as providing hyperlinked logos of the stores shown on the screen.
Pretty cool eh? Too bad we won’t be able to get our hands on it for awhile – according to an article on the Engadget website, the Microsoft Research development team has only created views of about four kilometers (about 2.5 miles), or 2400 panoramas, of city streets. But its advanced, user-friendly principles are promising.
PhysOrg.com’s Lin Edwards writes, “Researchers Johannes Kopf, Billy Chen, Richard Szeliski, and Michael Cohen say their system provides an uninterrupted transition between the bubbles and multi-perspective panoramas, and a dynamic stitching together of the views that simulates either a perspective view or a hyper-perspective view like viewing the street from a distance. This overcomes limitations of other systems, such as a reduction in resolution as the viewer zooms in to a view, and provides a sense of parallax to make the view seem more realistic as the viewer ‘street slides’ along the street façade.”
