Most of us are familiar with Google’s Street View and Bing’s Streetside. These tools allow you to virtually walk down a street in your browser; jumping between panoramic images and allowing you to get a feel for the street or location you are viewing instead of giving you impersonal lines on a map. While Street View is an amazing technology, the jumps between panoramas can be fairly significant; making the prospect of locating a small shop or building somewhat hit or miss.
Trust Microsoft to push the envelope with their services. Street Slide is Microsoft’s latest effort to make experiencing a location from the street level as seamless as possible. Using multiple perspectives to blend between different images, Microsoft presents a letterboxed view of the street. In the unused space above and below the image of the street, you are presented with street numbers that correspond with the buildings you are viewing, as well as navigation controls and corporate logos for individual businesses.
A YouTube video of the demo is after the break, and though Windows Phone 7 isn’t mentioned (some other smartphone is) it doesn’t take much of a stretch to see this coming to Microsoft’s upcoming mobile platform.
[via Engadget]
