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.

Locally Adapted Projections to Reduce Panorama Distortions

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The movie below is supplementary to a paper entitled Locally Adapted Projections to Reduce Panorama Distortions presented at the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2009.

The paper introduces locally-adapted projections for panoramic images. Defined as a continuous projection surface consisting of both near-planar and curved parts the simple and intuitive user interface allows the specification of regions of interest to be mapped to the near-planar parts, thereby reducing bending artifacts. The authors demonstrate the effectiveness of their approach on a variety of panoramic and wide angle images, including both indoor and outdoor scenes. It should however be noted that the ideas behind the paper are subject to dispute with the idea and proof of concept linked to the work of Helmut Dersch. Helmut is a well known innovator in the field and as he states omitting acknowledgments and references in high-level academic papers for sourced data, experiments or techniques is not acceptable. We concur completely with this view having seen various of our own labs work plagiarised over the years and action taken.



The link to the full paper has been removed in light of the update to the post.