Street Slide: Coming Soon to Bing?

Systems such as Google Street View and Bing Maps Streetside enable users to virtually visit cities by navigating between immersive 360° panoramas, or bubbles. The discrete moves from bubble to bubble enabled in these systems do not provide a good visual sense of a larger aggregate such as a whole city block. Multi-perspective "strip" panoramas can provide a visual summary of a city street but lack the full realism of immersive panoramas.

The movie below provides an overview of the system:




In a paper at SIGGRAPH Microsoft presented Street Slide, which combines the best aspects of the immersive nature of bubbles with the overview provided by multiperspective strip panoramas. They demonstrated a seamless transition between bubbles and multi-perspective panoramas presenting a dynamic construction of the panoramas which overcomes many of the limitations of previous systems.

As the user slides sideways, the multi-perspective 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.

You can view the paper here (13Mb, .pdf), with Microsofts Patent recently approved, it looks like this should be coming to Bing soon.

Bing Streetside: Flickr in 3D Space, 3D Transitions and Notable Potential

Microsoft have just just rolled out a new application that is currently in a tech preview phase that pulls photos from Flickr®, associates them with Bing Maps Streetside photos and then overlays them by stretching the photo to form fit where in the world it belongs. The new application called Streetside Photos is currently available in Seattle, San Francisco and Vancouver (Canada) to view your Flickr photos in a whole new way. We gave it a spin this morning and captured the video below, it has huge potential to view historic photos and crowd source the latest imagery.

Note how the 3D transitions between scenes and how the photos become part of the panorama:



See the post over on the Microsoft site for full details on Streetside or jump direct to the Streetside Photos application.

Adverts in Street View - Could be Video?

We noted last week via Gizmodo that Google has Google's filed a patent entitled "Claiming Real Estate in Panoramic or 3D Mapping Environments for Advertising," which in short allows them to paste media (adverts) onto the images.


Its interesting how the mouse in Street View follows the 3D space, we assume to allow any data to be tagged to buildings etc. With data of course comes the ability to provide click throughs and advertising. We dont think it will limited to simple images however as video can also be embedded into panoramas as one of our previous examples shows:


San Francisco Panorama with Embedded Video from digitalurban on Vimeo.

The example was quite easy to produce, we used the real estate of Twin Peaks in San Francisco, but this could of easily been an advert above Buckingham Palace and then that's when things get interesting...

View the live version of the San Francisco video embedded in panoramic space.

Google Street View in the UK? / Crowd Sourcing for Commercial Gain

The BBC have a good article online looking at opposition to introducing Street View to Google Maps in the UK. Apparently Google started capturing London this week.

The main issue is with the UK's privacy laws where people cannot be photographed without consent if the output is to be used for commercial gain - as is the case with Google Maps. There is also the issue of privacy in terms of houses appearing on the Internet - we did some work for Camden Council a while back and that was removed from the web due to issues with houses being identified in 360 x180 degree photographs.

The BBC article is well worth a read, especially for the quotes from the Privacy International Group.

We know Google have done a lot of good for mapping etc and we at digital urban are one of their strongest supporters but recently with their launch of MapMaker some criticism is emerging - see Google Wants to be TeleAtlas at the OpenGeoData Blog.

Web 2.0 is all well and good but companies are starting to use Neogeographers and Crowd Sourcing for their own commercial gain. Although of note is the word 'free' and the availability of free data, regardless of source, has changed the world of geographical information behind recognition over the last couple of years.

Its a controversial subject, as our in-box is testament to resulting in this being a revised version of the original post, we will have more thoughts on this in future posts...

Geolocate Comments in Panoramas: Street View in China by City 8

City8.com in China have a unique take on the use of panoramas to provide information about the city. Systems such as Google's Street View provide a blanket coverage of the road system but in reality are little more than 'eye candy'. City 8 on the other hand allows users to tag information inside the panorama - creating a simple yet effective way to geolocate comments and info on the urban environment.

The YouTube movie below provides an insight:



Take a look at http://www.city8.com for more info...