Slashdot Mirror
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."
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 data into a 3D world. You could then take that 3D world and do this same view on it, but it would be a lot smoother. In the video in the link, the picture is still very jumpy and doesn't always line up all that great at parts.
And beyond that, add in the augmented reality stuff.
Very 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 ?
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?
Wasn't that how BP described their efforts at cleaning up the gulf?
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
From seven years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_panorama
http://www.cs.iupui.edu/~jzheng/RP/index.html
Reminds me of the CSS Soda Can that hit the charts a few months ago.
Technoli
But we still have to leave our basements to visit the shops do we? If only there was some way of telling the shops what we wanted and then they'd deliver them right to our door for mom to bring down.
AT&ROFLMAO
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...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Yes, Actually removing (content aware fill) of the cars and pedestrians out of those images would be a very good idea.
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?
but I see it made the grade....
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
RUN ON LINUX???
If you make your album art -just right- you can do that with an iPod!
mod me funny
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 implemented 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 orchestrated.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
The rumor is that there's a reason for this. Cash-rich Microsoft supposedly employs some of the best and brightest software engineers on go-nowhere projects simply to keep them out of the available workforce. Since this talent doesn't end up in competing companies, this helps them maintain their monopoly position in their cash cows.
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.
From the page: "it is not going to work in IE6, because it doesn’t support background-attachment: fixed. I’ve tested it and it works in IE8".
+1 For using the right analogy in perfect context!
These days, I see nothing pushing Silverlight at all!
With the possible exception of Netflix...
Symbian...Microsoft's Flash challenger Silverlight hits Symbian
and porn. AEBN's Silverlight Player Gains Traction with Users
If you read TFA and watch the video, you'll see that it goes beyond Street View. This adds to the understood feature set of online map tools.
Take competitors product copy it and implement "new" features.
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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 you wanted to, which you don't. But did they listen? NO!
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.
MS didn't create Kinect, they bought it and it's going to fail because it's priced too high.
real-world innovation happens incrementally. It's rare for someone to come out with something new that is not based on past innovations.
Balderdash!
I'm sure this will work great in the 5 or so places where Bing's StreetSide is actually available.
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.
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 Ruby hot-ass advanced web sites.
I have seen the future, and it is the flavor of the day interpreted rapid prototyping web development platform!
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.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
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 will not be read.
Microsoft are making money, and lots of it, so they're doing something right.
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 to how MS admitted that Linux takes slightly fewer cycles to start a process up than Windows), and Singularity is a relatively very well known research project.
A research project about some abstract aspect of computer science of the sort that'd be applicable to Windows Mobile data compression or Office Visio data-map representations isn't going to get any slashdot attention but is going to help Microsoft's bottom line ultimately.
Check out http://research.microsoft.com to get a taste for the actual volume and flavor of research that goes on at MS
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
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?