Things are sure to get hot in the online map scene in the coming days. Finally Microsoft has renewed its vow to compete against Google Maps via the new Silverlight-powered Bing Maps beta. There are couple of reasons why this news is pretty exciting, but mainly because of one new feature of Bing Maps that will surely rock Google Maps’ world – Streetside View.
Nope, I didn’t mean Street View but Streetside View in all its gory 3D details. Sounds fun eh? Take a gander at these nice features of  Streetside View folksies:
- Ground level photographs fully stitched allowing full continuous immersion into the street level landscape
- Rotate images in a full 360 degree panorama
- Zoom-in and out on specific locations within the Streetside photos with the mouse clicks, mouse wheels or navigation controls
- Reverse geocoding tells you your approximate location within an address block
- Vector information of the road drawn onto the images illustrating the street direction and route geometry
- Street labels hovering within the images showing you road names (so you don’t get lost)
- Auto-fade of labels when mouse movement has stopped improving the visual context of the Streetside photos
- Overview map with direction projection image to indicate which direction you’re facing within the image
- Compass rotation allows you to move the photos around you or see which cardinal direction you’re facing
- Previous location button resets your view to the last known good view in case you walk down the wrong street and need to get out of there
Whew! Those are for Streetside View alone. Even more fun are the new features of Bing Maps itself. And these include – enhanced Bird’s Eye view of locations, application gallery such as Twitter GeoLocation Map features, Photosynth integration, local search integration, and more.
How I wish they have a video of some sort that demos all these features. Â There’s one video actually but unfortunately it requires Silverlight which I don’t really want to install on the Mac I’m using right now. Anyway if you’re using a PC go check out this video.
Originally posted on December 2, 2009 @ 5:26 pm
Too bad this feature is just about useless in it’s current state. Take my state for instance, Michigan. There is only one… ONE place in the entire state with streetside view, Detroit (even then it’s not the whole city) =( While certainly it’s the largest city in the state, there are other places I would have expected such as Ann Arbor which is probably the most Diverse city culturally as well as academically as it is the University of Michigan town.
Google on the other hand has street views just about everywhere including around my house and all local areas.
Bing has a LONG way to go, but competition is always a good thing =)
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