Microsoft Unveils Street Slide Map UI 80
theodp writes "For show-and-tell at SIGGRAPH 2010, Microsoft Research brought Street Slide, 'a multi-perspective street slide panorama with navigational aides and mini-map.' Very slick (demo video). Technology Review explains that Street Slide stitches together slices from multiple panoramas, making it possible to see all the shops on a street at once. Someone using Street Slide's panoramic view can slide along the facades looking for places of interest (perhaps guided by logos or ads at the bottom), and zoom back in to a classic Bing Streetside bubble view at any time."
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The only thing innovative that I saw were the icons that show up when you zoom out. But that also leaves that space for advertising. I don't have a desire to look at it further. And, the lady giving the presentation was so boring and uninspiring.
Re:Holy crap! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Maybe if you call making an obvious incremental improvement of a competitor's existing product innovative.
It's not like there aren't other better [http] implemented [hitta.se] alternatives out there either. And those are real and working, not some recorded and edited demo with near infinite resources to make it look quick for the video...
This whole article is a Microsoft Marketing puff-piece. Even the (near identical) comments in most of the discussion forums have been o
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Maybe if you call making an obvious incremental improvement of a competitor's existing product innovative.
According to wikipedia: "Innovation is a change in the thought process for doing something, or the useful application of new inventions or discoveries.[1] It may refer to an incremental emergent or radical and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations."
So I guess the answer is yes. Plus the Kinect technology isn't the only thing MS Research works on. Some of the research is interesting. Whether it makes it into a useful product depends on many factors one of which is mana
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I love the idiotic double standards people apply. When Apple releases essentially a new mp3 player (iPod) - oh my God, they innovated! When they release a new smartphone, iPhone - oh my God, Apple invented the SmartPhone! When they "invent" the Tablet PC they totally innovated the shit out of that 10 year old + idea!
If you want to play that silly game you can do the same thing with real game changers like the TiVo back in the day. "Omg, they just copied the VCR lolroflcatz!". It's idiocy.
Re:Holy crap! (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft is not full of idiots. The saying may go "Don't explain anything by conspiracy that is more easily explained by stupidity.", but that doesn't mean the opposite isn't true every once in a while.
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+1 For using the right analogy in perfect context!
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These sorts of research projects are the sort of things that are very cool and flashy, but probably would be hard to make money off, and probably don't represent the majority of MS research projects which we don't hear about which aren't flashy at all.
e.g. we've all heard of Photosynth and Songsmith, other flashy but uncommercialized projects, but probably fewer people know about Singularity (Or only know about it in reference
Was this MSFT or an acquisition? (Score:2)
I haven't connected the dots - mostly because I haven't been seen any outside the press release.
Does anyone know if this is genuine innovation on Microsoft's part, or just another technology purchase?
Begs me to think more of what is coming (Score:1)
This is kinda cool. Actually, it's the type of thing that I wonder how it doesn't already exist. It's just barely a step past street view and the like, in terms of thought.
But it makes me question more. When are we going to take Street view and the like and build more 3D environments off of it? I've seen more and more work in the direction, but there's multiple perspectives to many buildings and such using street view already. I would think it would be logical to try and accumulate all of the street view da
Why don't they use Silverlight? (Score:4, Interesting)
I am surprised that folks at Microsoft have decided to employ Adobe's Flash other than their own Silverlight.
You see, in the past, one would get a dialogue asking them to install Silverlight in order to see content. It makes me wonder whether Silverlight is slowly dying - at least in Microsoft's opinion. Remember the KIN [wikipedia.org]?
Re:Why don't they use Silverlight? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I am surprised that folks at Microsoft have decided to employ Adobe's Flash other than their own Silverlight.
Compare the market share of Flash and Silverlight. If you want to get your message passed to the most people, which platform would you pick?
Re:Why don't they use Silverlight? (Score:5, Interesting)
That sounds reasonable but as indicated in my post, one would get a dialog advising a Silverlight install; in fact, Microsoft's 'modus operandi' in the past had been to 'force' an install or upgrade.
These days, I see nothing pushing Silverlight at all!
None so blind (Score:4, Informative)
These days, I see nothing pushing Silverlight at all!
With the possible exception of Netflix...
Symbian...Microsoft's Flash challenger Silverlight hits Symbian [theregister.co.uk]
and porn. AEBN's Silverlight Player Gains Traction with Users [avn.com]
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Well, its win-win for them in this situation. Using flash kinda slights Apple, where Silverlight is proprietary lock-in.
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Speaking of Apple -- did anyone notice the smartphone they were demo'ing on in the video was an iPhone?
Even poor Microsoft employees don't use WinMo!
Re:Why don't they use Silverlight? (Score:5, Informative)
What makes you think they're using Flash. Only the demo video is in Flash, the implementation will most likely be Silverlight(new version of Bing Maps already uses it). Also, the only way to develop apps for Windows Phone 7 is through Silverlight(XNA for games), so I don't they're abandoning it anytime soon. Far from it, they're pushing it more.
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MS Research has free reign to basically do whatever they like and it looks like they hosted the video on YouTube. So that's where the flash comes in. But that choice itself is kind of interesting because it's the exact people they want to compete with using this technology: YouTube -> Google
Most likely it wasn't give too much thought though, thankfully. Marketing is pretty hands off when it comes to MS R&D.
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i think MS can finally think a few years ahead again. smartphones carry a nice premium these days where the hardware makers can sell them at nice margins. but this is going the way of the dodo and soon software will be king again. the hardware smartphone makers will be the dell/hp commodity box builders where no one really cares about brand and lowest cost wins. only difference from the 1990's seems to be that instead of the OS and an office suite being the cash cows this time it seems to be providing the i
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SL2 is certified. SL3 certification is nearing completion.
If NMCI is blocking the software, it is a local misconfiguration or other human error. There is no non-silverlight policy.
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Interesting (Score:1)
So, is this solely the technology of stitching panoramas together, or am I to believe that Microsoft has laid down the framework for a possible equivalent to the Streetview cars/mapping them to the equivalent points on their map service?
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It's kinda cute, but I'm not really sure it's that innovative - or what problem it's trying to solve.
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"Very slick" (Score:1, Funny)
Wasn't that how BP described their efforts at cleaning up the gulf?
That reminds me of this (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_panorama [wikipedia.org]
http://www.cs.iupui.edu/~jzheng/RP/index.html [iupui.edu]
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Except that is entirely different. That is mostly what google street view does (except expanded with view bubbles). That is simply a long panorama. Google Street View is a panorama + 360 view bubbles.
Street Slide takes Street View-like view bubbles and intelligently stitches them back into a panorama for getting a good spatial map of an area. Then when you need to zoom back in, it pushes you into the correct bubble. It is much easier for a person to view and use than either of the previous models.
Re:That reminds me of this (Score:5, Informative)
Except that is entirely different. That is mostly what google street view does (except expanded with view bubbles). That is simply a long panorama. Google Street View is a panorama + 360 view bubbles. Street Slide takes Street View-like view bubbles and intelligently stitches them back into a panorama for getting a good spatial map of an area. Then when you need to zoom back in, it pushes you into the correct bubble. It is much easier for a person to view and use than either of the previous models.
So what you are saying is that the panorama that is created by stitching image slices together (a la Dr. Zheng et al)...
Technology Review explains that Street Slide stitches together slices from multiple panoramas,
...has hyperlinks on it that bring it to a Google bubble view. I give props to Microsoft for putting peanutbutter in their chocolate, but they didn't do a lot of inventing here.
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CSS Soda Can (Score:2, Interesting)
Reminds me of the CSS Soda Can [romancortes.com] that hit the charts a few months ago.
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It works in IE 8 (Score:2)
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That says more about IE6 than it says about the page.
I still see a problem (Score:4, Funny)
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I could find out where these shops look like by driving past them....?
Or I could look on Google streetview, now, without using this app
Or I could buy online and not visit them at all?
Brilliant MS research does it again, produces a slick new technology ideal for a market that either already exists or does not exist ?
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But we still have to leave our basements to visit the shops do we?
I'd love to be able to leave my basement, but only a relative few have been able to do that. However, all the shops actually are in my basement; my basement has a blue ceiling with a fusion lamp that contains my two-story (one underground) sub-basement.
The first nerd in history ever to leave the basement was named Yuri Gargarin.
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Well, call me if google ever innovates something.
You know that ALL those nice google products are just ouside companies work bought with their advertising billions?
Funny thing, there was a long time where google earth printouts still showed as "Keyhole Print Job" in the printers...
Extinguish the pedistrians and cars. (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, Actually removing (content aware fill) of the cars and pedestrians out of those images would be a very good idea.
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I worked on this project, and you're right, its 100% the same and is not at all an improvement. I wasn't aware of this "Google Street View" you speak of. Have a link by any chance? I KNEW we should have posted the idea to /. BEFORE doing any work. I told my superiors you guys would probably already know an existing implementation, would have seen this 10 years ago in some other platform in a tangentially arranged mode, would not be impressed by it, and could probably make it in five minutes with perl if
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It's so refreshing to finally see someone admit this. Really, if you're in any field of endeavor and no matter how much of an expert you are, how many decades you've been doing it, there's always some nameless uber-nerd on Slashdot who knows more about it than you. Similarly, no matter if you're a senior fellow software developer with 2 Ph.Ds and you make $500k a year you are a simple minded dolt programmer compared to some of these Slashdot UNIX guys cranking out Next Generation PHP and Next Generation R
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Rightly said Fred! I think /. should just become the new peer review site for all scientific and technical articles. Get it reviewed by someone who read that article about that topic one time, and therefore is well qualified to comment on how your research has been done before, isn't commercially viable, probably is made up, and here's a goatsecs for your trouble. Please note that all articles should include a brief inflammatory summary with factual errors and links to random blogs, as the actual article
This is neat and all... (Score:2, Insightful)
They were worried about handling slopes... (Score:4, Funny)
Yes! Yes! Very impressive.... but does it... (Score:1)
RUN ON LINUX???
Looks like Coverflow (Score:2)
If you make your album art -just right- you can do that with an iPod!
The new embrace and extend? (Score:1)
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And in "enemy of my enemy is my friend", use an iPhone.
Flickering multi-perspective scrolling (Score:2, Interesting)
Did anyone else find the multi-perspective really annoying due to the flickering effect of constantly changing images when scrolling?
I don't think having the perspective view really enhances our understanding of the scene. In reality, it's just going to increase the bandwidth necessary to run this app.
It would be nice if there was an option, at least, to turn multi-perspective off and just see a blended mosaic of straight-on views.
Availability (Score:2)