Microsoft Street Slide

I love the stuff Microsoft is doing with it’s mapping technology lately. This latest one from Microsoft Research is particularly impressive.

It’s called Microsoft Street Slide (not to be confused with Microsoft Streetside) and takes the whole photo stitching paradigm another step forward. It’s best explained in the following video, but in a nutshell it allows you to navigate maps via ‘immersive 360 degree panoramas’. You ‘slide’ up and down streets via a very smooth panorama interface:

The obvious question is whether this will make it into mainstream inclusion in Bing. I hope it does. It was unveiled at SIGGRAPH this week (perhaps as part of this) but that doesn’t necessarily confirm any future release – there’s been plenty of exciting internal Microsoft projects that never made it through to mainstream release. That said though, other Microsoft projects (including ones from Microsoft Research such as Photosynth and Photo Fuse) have made it into the product cycle. Fingers crossed.