Google's StreetView technology, which is embedded into the Google Maps product on the browser, and on mobile phones like the iPhone and Android, has long wowed users with its option to view the road inside a 360-degree panorama. But Microsoft Research's latest effort, which is being unveiled at this week's Siggraph computer graphics conference, approaches viewing streets from a different direction. Literally.
Instead of having users venture from one "bubble" of captured imagery to the next, as is done in Google's StreetView and Microsoft's Streetside, the new technology, called "Street Slide," stitches together multiple panoramas into one, large strip that users are able to scroll through side to side. And in place of putting information overlays on the imagery itself, things like street signs and business information are placed below, and out of sight of what was captured.
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