Street Slide: Coming Soon to Bing?

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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.

Skape - 3D City Viewer and Download Tool: New Movie and Demo Online

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Earlier this week we had the pleasure of meeting the people from Infoterra for a demo of their recently released 3D city viewer. Known as 'Skape' it enables you to view and perhaps more importantly upload and download highly realistic 3D environments, for visual concepts and interaction with building information. With 12 cities in the UK now available the level of detail and fidelity in the textures is notable. We tend to get quite a few companies through the doors of CASA with 3D models and we can honestly say Skape is the best we have seen so far. The movie below provides an overview, its interesting to see how far the industry has come in just a few short years:


Skape is designed as a professional tool, moving it away from the current models and level of functionality found in Google Earth or Bing. It is aimed at a range of industries, including architecture, planning, building development and environmental consultation. However, it is free to view the cities and at the moment free to create movies as well, as such it makes for an interesting spatial analysis and visualization tool.

Take a look at http://www.skapeworld.com/index.htm for more info and to try it out.

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

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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.

Traffic in the Cloud: Bing Maps Silverlight and DeepEarth

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Soul Solutions have announced their project launch for the Azure #newcloudapp international competition. Called Traffic in the Cloud it provides a rich interactive mapping twist on public webcams throughout the world.

The interface and fullscreen results are impressive, for those without Silverlight installed we have recorded a quick look movie below:



Head over to the Soul Solutions blog for full details on the set up and how to add your own cameras.