Microsoft’s Street Slide is a new 360 immersive viewer similar to Google’s Street View and Microsoft’s Streetside. But Microsoft’s Street Slide enable users to navigate between immersive 360° panoramas, or “bubbles”. You can move from bubble to bubble with a coherent visual sense of the whole city block by sliding along the strip view of the street.
Microsoft’s Street Slide (above), combines the best aspects of the immersive nature of bubbles with the overview provided by a strip panoramas.
Street Slide’s panoramic view lets you slide along the facades. You can zoom back in to a classic bubble view at any time. A user can also flip the viewpoint to see the other side of the street, or turn corners onto new streets.
The wider view provided by Street Slide offers empty space on the screen below the image of the street. This space may be used to display the logos of businesses, or a map.
Microsoft says it’s being ported to mobile phones like the iPhone and presumably Windows 7 mobile.
Mok Oh, founder of EveryScape, a Cambridge, MA, startup that captures panoramic imagery of buildings inside and out, says Street Slide could make it easier for users to explore an area. EveryScape currently offers a panoramic image app developed using the Bing Maps software development kit.
