

Bing now offers 3d street view (needs silverlight) - anigbrowl
http://www.bing.com/maps/explore/

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carbon8
For those who aren't interested in installing silverlight, it's just a street
view clone, but much slower, with a fraction of the coverage, more obvious
shearing when you move around and a blue circle with a person icon instead of
a simple white circle for navigation.

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anigbrowl
I don't think that's really fair. I'm not finding it significantly slower
here, and it handles some things worse, but others better - eg try downtown
San Francisco and spin around to look up at the tops of skyscrapers...the Bing
thing is handling perspective deformation much better, whereas Google
Streetview introduces a lot of messy artifacts as the 3d parameters change.

It is limited and it's still beta-feeling, but I'm all in favor of the
competition...having two large companies duke it out to provide the best
virtual rendition of the world can only be a good thing.

(On a side note, I wonder how long before this gets used for ad
placement...when I'm looking at a city street and see a store with a big Pepsi
sign outside, why don't I get an ad for Pepsi if I click on it? The technology
exists; if I screencap a region of interest and drop the result into Tineye,
it's pretty good at finding matches for corporate logos and giving me a link
to their website...)

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carbon8
_"I'm not finding it significantly slower here"_

I'm on a relatively late model macbook pro using safari with a fresh
silverlight install and it's dramatically slower than street view, enough that
it's difficult to navigate around.

 _"the Bing thing is handling perspective deformation much better, whereas
Google Streetview introduces a lot of messy artifacts as the 3d parameters
change."_

I don't see what you are referring to. What I do see is poorer quality from
the top camera on google (
[http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...](http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=san+francisco&sll=41.88295,-87.630901&sspn=0.017956,0.034676&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=San+Francisco,+California&ll=37.792524,-122.399797&spn=0.008546,0.051026&t=h&z=15&layer=c&cbll=37.793093,-122.399935&panoid=H7XLvZ0VvCQ4UWveoS4SDQ&cbp=12,27.09,,0,-30.22)
), but I also see artifacts and whole blurred sections (like frosted glass) of
images on bing, though it's apparently not possible to link to individual
views.

And other than what I mentioned, it really, actually is just a straight up
street view clone. It's not a value judgement, it's just a fact. One huge
company cloned something created by another huge company. I'm not sure why any
of these statements would be controversial to anyone unless they had a stake
in the success of one over the other.

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anigbrowl
Well, I have no shares or commercial ties to Microsoft or Google :) and I did
describe it as 'street view' to begin with...I certainly don't mean to imply
it's anything other than a clone. Both have artifacts, I just like some minor
technical aspects about the Bing offering but I'm not trying to sell it. I
only posted it because Google hasn't had any competition for that
functionality up to now.

I'm using Chrome in Win7 btw...I feel that with both Chrome (dev channel) and
Silverlight the fact that you're on a Mac _might_ explain the performance lag,
seeing as neither company optimizes for that platform.

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anigbrowl
coverage is limited right now, but includes most of downtown SF. I have to say
the 3d implementation is rather impressive.

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joshu
can someone grab a screencast?

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andreyf
Doesn't work in Chrome on OSX (can't type in search box, either).

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electromagnetic
Microsoft seems to have put very little effort into browser support for
Chrome, it took forever to be able to send an email through a hotmail account.
I have no understanding how or why a simple text field wasn't accessible, but
MS somehow found a way.

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DrJokepu
It works perfectly for me in Chrome 3 / Windows. Chrome for Mac is not even in
beta yet so I can imagine that they haven't tested it.

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nym
Didn't work for me, it seems like their streetview tilecache is broken. Then
again, it could be a corporate firewall problem too.

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bengebre
Doesn't appear to work with Firefox 3.5.5

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gizmo
Works fine on my Firefox 3.5.5

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Daishiman
Silverlight? No intrested.

I'm not trolling. I just really have no interest in adding another piece of
software restricted to Windows to my existing repertoir of plugins.

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Elepsis
Silverlight runs on the mac, and there's Moonlight for Linux. Not trolling
indeed.

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Daishiman
Moonlight will never reach feature parity and is unable to run most of the
common Silverlight apps. The chance of Silverlight working on OS X in a few
years is about the same as IE working on OS X, or Office for Mac having full
support for macros (if it's not clear, MS dropped support for both).

What about mobile devices? Stuff running on ARM?

More of our computing time is being moved away from PCs. If this doesn't work
with a browser of with an open set of technologies, it is bound to stagnate
and lead to lock-in.

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ct
i like it -- pretty impressed as I'm learning Silverlight atm and is
inspirational to keep on doing some more coding in it.

