Microsoft makes street navigation faster with slide panoramas

While potentially creepy, Street View is a very useful tool when trying to find your way around a new city, so Microsoft has been working on improving this feature, with one way to achieve that being presented at SIGGRAPH 2010 under the name of 'Street Slide'.

Street Slide basically provides people with a panorama of a street, enabling fast navigation through the multiple images that make it up. It's a 2D view, as opposed to the 3D bubble of a regular Street View caption, but it can provide a good overall perspective of a street. Better still, you can transition from Street Slide to Street View (and back) practically instantly anytime, so there should be no loss of direction and location.

"As the user slides sideways, the multi-perspective panorama is constructed and rendered dynamically to simulate either a perspective or hyper-perspective view. This provides a strong sense of parallax, which adds to the immersion. We call this form of sliding sideways while looking at a street façade a street slide. Finally we integrate annotations and a mini-map within the user interface to provide geographic information as well additional affordances for navigation."

The team behind Street Slide is currently working on a snapshot of the application for Apple's iPhone but didn't provide a time line for it.