It's really amazing how decisively Microsoft is beating Google in world-mapping, despite being second or third to market. Here's some data points:<p>1. Microsoft's take on Google's idea of hybrid map rendering (labels overlayed on satellite/aerial images) has yielded the most beautiful hybrid I've ever seen on an online map.<p>2. Sometime ago a commenter of my blog needed to go from Moscow to Shanghai, and Microsoft's map was the only one that produced a usable route. (For this you need to road networks of all the countries along the way, and not choke on huge routes.)<p>3. Photosynth, 'nuff said. And the followup "finding paths through the world's photos" by the same research group. And that mind-blowing demo (given by the same person, Blaise Aguiera y Arcas) where they incorporated a live camera feed into panoramic views. Look them all up, you won't be disappointed.<p>4. Bird's eye view and the streets overlaid on top of that.<p>5. 3D cities in Bing Maps are created professionally, unlike the cities in Google Earth, and it shows.<p>6. Bing's street-side view has exceptional 3D cues of movement.<p>And now this. I love watching all this stuff slowly come together.
In the 1970s, Stanley Kubrick sent a photographer out to take thousands of photographs step by step along London's Commercial Road. The result was somewhat like Street Slide: <a href="http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article4338674.ece" rel="nofollow">http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertai...</a><p><i>Kubrick's boxes - hundreds upon hundreds of them - were receptacles for millions of details about films he mostly never made. One contained photos of Commercial Road in London, taken over the course of a year by his nephew, Manuel Harlan. Harlan stood on a 12ft ladder to photograph every building on the road and laid out the results for the great man to examine in his lair near St Albans. “Sure beats going there,” said Kubrick, delighted.</i><p>Kubrick would have had a field day if he were still alive.
This has got to be the greatest thing MSFT has done for the web since Ajax. I don't know; maybe I'm missing something. Assuming they aren't going to patent it or something similarly insane. And assuming it works in a normal browser. There is hope though the video shows a demo on an iphone.<p>I've known a number of really smart people at Microsoft Research. And I've always wondered why they seem to produce so little. A secondary curiosity - how do they manage to hire such great researchers with their tarnished reputation over the last decade.
Call me when they have something other than a demo. If this demo was from Google, I could see it happening. But not from MSFT, specially if it more expensive (we don't know) to implement this and if there is no near term profit making potential. Thats, in my opinion, how MSFT works.<p>On the other hand, if there is something cool developed by Google, they will implement it and think about making money later (if it gains traction). Not necessarily because they are altruistic, but because thats how they work.<p>You will never see something like Google Wave coming out of MSFT; where Google obviously invested a lot of money, opened it up (mostly) for everyone to do what they want and after more than one year in no money is being made and unlikely to be profitable any time soon, if ever.
Looks neat. Have only skimmed the paper but I'm surprised they didn't cite Zheng et al.'s Route Panorama work: <a href="http://www.cs.iupui.edu/~jzheng/RP/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cs.iupui.edu/~jzheng/RP/</a>
Microsoft researchers didn't let corporate politics stand in their way -- they wrote the mobile version for the iPhone, not Windows Phone 7 (Street Slide is still unreleased, mind you).<p>Now, will Google Maps engineers be able to perform a similar feat and implement a technology invented at Microsoft?
I like how they are listing businesses in the letterbox. Although, in that part of downtown Seattle there are 10 times more Starbucks than what they're showing in the video . . . and I'm not exaggerating.
I was excited when I followed the link, not so much when I saw "Microsoft researchers have developed" as the lead in sentence.<p>CNET confirms: "MSFT has not announced if and when it will be making it to the Bing Maps, or any other map-embedded Microsoft products or services"<p><a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20011994-248.html" rel="nofollow">http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20011994-248.html</a><p>Hope they prove me wrong and just ship.
This is very innovative. Great development in user interface and visualization. Something good came out of MS Research.<p>The general idea can be adopted to different use cases. Hope they don't patent it to dead.
While this is a neat way to navigate panoramas, in practice it is very difficult to get a smooth transition between perspectives without a lot of source images (you can tell when they switch to the unstitched view that they were using a much higher density of images than with street view panoramas, especially at intersections).<p>Interestingly, multi-perspective push-broom images is essentially how the street-view team got started.
I thought they were going to allow seamless zooming down the street. That would be cool, and the data is available to do it.<p>The as-perspective-as-possible transitions could be a lot smoother, but I guess they wanted to minimize the processing power needed, so it can run in-browser etc.
A bit OT I know, but just visited the MicroSoft Street Slide site. They posted a very nice example video.<p>Let me just say thank you to everyone involved in producing that well-written, well-spoken, well-recorded, straight-forward intelligent piece of A/V work.<p>Well done.