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2011-02-05

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.

5 comments:

  1. Anonymous8:21 AM

    having such a realtime multiperspective dynamic image projected on surfaces in 3d google earth would be PERFECT, dense urban areas wouldn't require the labor-intensive modeling of buildings anymore

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  2. C.H. Kinney9:45 PM

    This is amazing for several reasons. First, because it makes facades so much easier to see and appreciate, although I wish it were possible to make the whole facade, from top to bottom, visible. Second, because it's always good to see a hometown company, Microsoft, using Seattle as a platform for demonstrating their urban technology. Hopefully we'll see this soon on Bing.

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  3. Not wishing to take anything away from this cool looking interface, but Google StreetView DOES slide between bubbles when using Google Earth app. Google also captured rough LIDAR data, so there is 3D information which deforms the bubble (so the street is flat, and the buildings pop up). The 3D sensation of moving thru StreetView imagery is very compelling, especially on an immersive vis rig such as LiquidGalaxy. Highly recommended for virtual field trips!

    Andrew / eResearch / Uni of Western Sydney

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  4. With this project of Bing, I do hope they avoid the same troubles that Google went through in streetview.

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  5. the LIDAR data in Google is impressive, which I'm sure they'd also use in their Google indoor project. Hope Bing catches up though.

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