
Microsoft Street Slide: Street view will never be the same - iamelgringo
http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-street-slide-street-view-will-never-be-the-same
======
cousin_it
It's really amazing how decisively Microsoft is beating Google in world-
mapping, despite being second or third to market. Here's some data points:

1\. Microsoft's take on Google's idea of hybrid map rendering (labels
overlayed on satellite/aerial images) has yielded the most beautiful hybrid
I've ever seen on an online map.

2\. Sometime ago a commenter of my blog needed to go from Moscow to Shanghai,
and Microsoft's map was the only one that produced a usable route. (For this
you need to road networks of all the countries along the way, and not choke on
huge routes.)

3\. Photosynth, 'nuff said. And the followup "finding paths through the
world's photos" by the same research group. And that mind-blowing demo (given
by the same person, Blaise Aguiera y Arcas) where they incorporated a live
camera feed into panoramic views. Look them all up, you won't be disappointed.

4\. Bird's eye view and the streets overlaid on top of that.

5\. 3D cities in Bing Maps are created professionally, unlike the cities in
Google Earth, and it shows.

6\. Bing's street-side view has exceptional 3D cues of movement.

And now this. I love watching all this stuff slowly come together.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>"It's really amazing how decisively Microsoft is beating Google in world-
mapping, despite being second or third to market."

Bing's mapping tools are built on/what were Multimap aren't they? AFAIK
multimap preceded Google Maps and had aerial imagery - a mix between satellite
and street view - before Google and before it was handed over to Bing? (This
has been my perception, could well be wrong).

Doesn't this mean that Microsoft is beating Google in mapping because they
bought the leader in mapping at the time and have [amazingly] built on that??
Slightly less glorious.

~~~
cousin_it
Um, citations? I don't think Bing Maps were built on Multimap in any way, and
I don't remember Multimap having aerial images before Google. I could be
wrong, though. AFAIK, the only map that had aerial data before Google maps
(and the only draggable tiled map before Google maps) was map.search.ch, built
by Endoxon which was later bought by Google.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I did take pains to stress this was my perception, note that GoogleMaps is not
the same everywhere, neither I suppose is MM or BingMaps.

> _I don't remember Multimap having aerial images before Google_

Here's a good review from 2005 of the situation in the USA,
[http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/2005/05/24/msn-
vs-g...](http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/2005/05/24/msn-vs-google-
searching-earth) ; I'm not in the USA.

From 2003:

"The public web site <http://www.multimap.com> provides a range of free,
useful services to assist with everyday life.Key features include street-level
maps of the United Kingdom, Europe and the US; road maps of the world; door-
to-door travel directions; aerial photographs; weather forecasts; the London
Underground map; links to location information; and services such as hotel,
restaurant and entertainment booking.Multimap.com, which was recently voted
Best Internet Service in the World Communication Awards 2002, attracts over
6.3 million unique users every month and is one of the top 10 most visited
websites in the UK."
([http://www.directionsmag.com/mobile/news/index.php?duty=Show...](http://www.directionsmag.com/mobile/news/index.php?duty=Show&id=8274))

From 1999: "Aerial Images, Inc. and UK Perspectives announced today that high-
resolution color aerial photography of all of the United Kingdom will be made
available for viewing and purchase on the TerraServer(TM) at
www.terraserver.com ." (<http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-54597413.html>)

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petercooper
In the 1970s, Stanley Kubrick sent a photographer out to take thousands of
photographs step by step along London's Commercial Road. The result was
somewhat like Street Slide:
[http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertai...](http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article4338674.ece)

 _Kubrick's boxes - hundreds upon hundreds of them - were receptacles for
millions of details about films he mostly never made. One contained photos of
Commercial Road in London, taken over the course of a year by his nephew,
Manuel Harlan. Harlan stood on a 12ft ladder to photograph every building on
the road and laid out the results for the great man to examine in his lair
near St Albans. “Sure beats going there,” said Kubrick, delighted._

Kubrick would have had a field day if he were still alive.

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jmatt
This has got to be the greatest thing MSFT has done for the web since Ajax. I
don't know; maybe I'm missing something. Assuming they aren't going to patent
it or something similarly insane. And assuming it works in a normal browser.
There is hope though the video shows a demo on an iphone.

I've known a number of really smart people at Microsoft Research. And I've
always wondered why they seem to produce so little. A secondary curiosity -
how do they manage to hire such great researchers with their tarnished
reputation over the last decade.

~~~
bandushrew
This kind of thing interests me as a geek, its clearly pretty cool, but I dont
think it adds _that_ much to the standard street view. As a user, the standard
street view is 80% of what I want, they have added another 5% on top of that
which is nice, but oddly enough I dont feel (at the moment) as if it is
actually that compelling. Its a weird perspective, I love the tech, but I dont
think I will ever care enough to go out of my way to use it.

~~~
encoderer
Fair enough,but from my POV, street view has a hardly-usable UI. The way you
have to click, render, click, render, click, render, Street View works the way
MapQuest worked before Google Maps was built.

Street Slide is to Street View what Google Maps was to MapQuest.

~~~
bandushrew
That is absolutely true, of course.

The thing is that I very rarely actually _want_ to scroll right along a
street, I usually only want to get a visual of the place that I am going.

Now, there have been times where I was interested in going exploring, but not
as a matter of utility - just because the street view ui begged me to and I
was interested in how it worked.

Having said that, I believe that there is a definite place for something that
lets me zoom along in 3d land to explore the entire street - because I would
_love_ to be able to explore Paris for example - but that really requires a
free form of movement that this solution still doesn't speak to.

~~~
fuzzythinker
Maybe that is precisely why you didn't want to use it -- google's street view
interface was not right for you.

~~~
bandushrew
yeah, it could be. I do use street view, but just because I find it useful to
have a visual of the entrance and location of the place I am going.

But I agree, aside from the playful inclination to go and explore, its never
been a big thing for me.

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pavs
Call me when they have something other than a demo. If this demo was from
Google, I could see it happening. But not from MSFT, specially if it more
expensive (we don't know) to implement this and if there is no near term
profit making potential. Thats, in my opinion, how MSFT works.

On the other hand, if there is something cool developed by Google, they will
implement it and think about making money later (if it gains traction). Not
necessarily because they are altruistic, but because thats how they work.

You will never see something like Google Wave coming out of MSFT; where Google
obviously invested a lot of money, opened it up (mostly) for everyone to do
what they want and after more than one year in no money is being made and
unlikely to be profitable any time soon, if ever.

~~~
yread
There is profit making potential - they could put advertisements on the shops
above the actual shops in the overview mode

~~~
nailer
Agreed, but I think the parent is saying MS won't execute.

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SandB0x
Looks neat. Have only skimmed the paper but I'm surprised they didn't cite
Zheng et al.'s Route Panorama work: <http://www.cs.iupui.edu/~jzheng/RP/>

~~~
greendestiny
I did my PhD in Multiperspective imaging (if that can be considered a field :)
and I remember some guys from Stanford did some work specifically on these
kind of street views. Here's a link to an overview at least
<http://graphics.stanford.edu/~ggaurav/research.html>

I think that guy in particular might have ended up at Google, it must be a bit
painful to see Microsoft release a demo of this stuff.

~~~
DanielH
He has ended up at Google:

"Bio Google::Software Engineer"

<http://twitter.com/ggaurav>

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mrshoe
Microsoft researchers didn't let corporate politics stand in their way -- they
wrote the mobile version for the iPhone, not Windows Phone 7 (Street Slide is
still unreleased, mind you).

Now, will Google Maps engineers be able to perform a similar feat and
implement a technology invented at Microsoft?

~~~
guelo
I'm having a hard time unpacking this. Microsoft wrote a demo on Apple's
platform so you want Google to write something on a Microsoft platform? Seems
like a non sequitur. BTW, Google's stuff has been on Apple's platform since
day one.

~~~
mrshoe
Ugh. Here's some unpacking, then:

I never said Google should write something on a Microsoft platform. I implied
that Google _should_ implement this Street Slide method in Google Maps and
mused as to whether the Google brass would allow them to copy a Microsoft
innovation.

You see, within Big Companies there is a common problem where engineers aren't
allowed to use competitors' technologies because it hurts the corporate image.
No one wants to see "Google copies Microsoft with new Maps feature" headlines,
just like no one wants to see "Not even Microsoft engineers are stupid enough
to develop for Windows Phone 7" headlines. Some people call this Not Invented
Here Syndrome. This is a problem because it's counterproductive. Street Slide
_should_ be implemented on the iPhone first. Google Maps _should_ add Street
Slide. Hopefully their corporate overlords will have the vision to allow the
engineers to do so.

~~~
roc
> _"whether the Google brass would allow them to copy a Microsoft
> innovation."_

Have you seen Google's search results lately?

The web results and the image search updates have no lack of Bing-ish-ness.

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Timmy_C
I like how they are listing businesses in the letterbox. Although, in that
part of downtown Seattle there are 10 times more Starbucks than what they're
showing in the video . . . and I'm not exaggerating.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
On 1st or on 4th? There's only one SBUX on 1st between showbox and cherry st,
on Columbia I think.

~~~
Timmy_C
I was thinking more generally about downtown. I counted 10 between Belltown
and Pioneer Square.

But to your point, there are 2 Starbucks' directly on 1st; one in Pike Place
and one just up from the ferry terminal.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
The one in Pike's Place is to the west of Post Alley; it's not really on 1st.
There's only one on 1st between Showbox and Cherry, which is the one on
Columbia just up from the ferry terminal.

I agree, though, that there are an inordinate number of SBUX-owned coffee
shops downtown, especially once you factor in the SBCs.

------
elblanco
Brilliant. I find I spend an awful lot of my time in street view trying to do
exactly this.

------
aresant
I was excited when I followed the link, not so much when I saw "Microsoft
researchers have developed" as the lead in sentence.

CNET confirms: "MSFT has not announced if and when it will be making it to the
Bing Maps, or any other map-embedded Microsoft products or services"

<http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20011994-248.html>

Hope they prove me wrong and just ship.

~~~
apu
MSR is one of the top computer science academic-research labs in the world --
their output, especially in my field of computer vision/graphics, rivals any
university at all of the top conferences. As other comments have stated, they
have an unbelievable amount of freedom in tackling projects and have managed
to attract lots of very good people. This freedom, however, comes at the price
of research not necessarily making it to commercial product (at least not
right away).

But that's not the goal. This kind of research solves the "hard" problems,
hopefully making it easier for engineers at MS (or at other companies) to make
a working system. This is not to downplay the latters' roles -- as any
engineer can tell you, making a working system for consumers is a very time-
consuming process that requires a lot of manpower, engineering, graphic and
usability design, etc.

The difference is simply in division of labor. Researchers push the boundary
of what's possible, engineers fill in the newly excavated space with working
and polished products.

Incidentally, while Google manages to hire all the best
engineers/hackers/programmers, their research groups aren't at the level of
MSR's yet. In part, I think this is because their research actually makes it
to product fairly fast -- because the researchers have to spend a fair amount
of time integrating new research results into products. I wonder if this
culture will change...

~~~
mturmon
It seems mistaken to assert that Google's R&D enterprise is not "pushing the
boundary of what's possible". Stopping with published papers and conference
prominence, when you have the reach that MSFT does, seems to be missing an
opportunity.

And given this, which culture is under more pressure to change, MSR's or
Google's?

~~~
pierrefar
I think you're confusing MSR with MS corporate. The corporate culture at MS
seems to be very different from the MSR culture, and it's the corporate
culture that people pick on.

Comparing MSR with Google doesn't make sense because MSR is very independent
from MS corporate, culture wise at least.

~~~
eru
Just to give an example: MSR is developing a Haskell compiler, and they run
Linux on some of their boxes.

------
ww520
This is very innovative. Great development in user interface and
visualization. Something good came out of MS Research.

The general idea can be adopted to different use cases. Hope they don't patent
it to dead.

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kroo
While this is a neat way to navigate panoramas, in practice it is very
difficult to get a smooth transition between perspectives without a lot of
source images (you can tell when they switch to the unstitched view that they
were using a much higher density of images than with street view panoramas,
especially at intersections).

Interestingly, multi-perspective push-broom images is essentially how the
street-view team got started.

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wazoox
This works fine for long, straight streets, typical of some cities
(particularly US cities). Not so much elsewhere...

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10ren
I thought they were going to allow seamless zooming down the street. That
would be cool, and the data is available to do it.

The as-perspective-as-possible transitions could be a lot smoother, but I
guess they wanted to minimize the processing power needed, so it can run in-
browser etc.

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johnohara
A bit OT I know, but just visited the MicroSoft Street Slide site. They posted
a very nice example video.

Let me just say thank you to everyone involved in producing that well-written,
well-spoken, well-recorded, straight-forward intelligent piece of A/V work.

Well done.

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houseabsolute
Cool, but "will never be the same" is a bit much when descibing a relatively
minor increment of a basically useless feature.

~~~
nitrogen
Neither Street View itself nor the ability to move within it are useless. I
use Street View to locate the entrances to unfamiliar stores, find parking,
identify landmarks, etc., saving myself a considerable amount of time spent
driving (and CO2 emissions).

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alanh
Silverlight?

