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Microsoft Unveils Street Slide Map UI
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."
No - something had to have entered the public consciousness before it could possibly be remembered.
Microsoft Research does many innovative things. It's Microsoft management that either fails to capitalize on it or takes a good idea and ruins it. Sometimes good ideas (ie MS Kinnect) escape and makes it into a useful product.
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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.
but it also looks like something a few Google employees could implement themselves in an afternoon by simply looking at the provided demo. Depending of course on what ridiculous patents MS has wrapped up in it. Still I was expecting something at least as impressive as Photosynth. Why aren't they doing anything interesting with that anyway?
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 management. Xerox PARC is the best example of a great research center that has truly changed the world today. However, Xerox management failed to capitalize on many of the innovations there: Ethernet, smalltalk, GUI, WYSIWYG text editor, etc.
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