Microsoft has launched something it is calling Street Slide, which has the best aspects of Google Street View and Bing Maps Streetside but allows you to navigate quickly down an entire street dipping in without getting into horrendous digital knots as you try to focus on the one part of the street that you are interested in.

Microsoft Street Slide gives a great visual sense of a whole city block that brings together the best aspects of the immersive nature of bubbles (like Street View) with the overview provided by multiperspective strip panoramas.

“We demonstrate a seamless transition between bubbles and multi-perspective panoramas. We also present a dynamic construction of the panoramas which overcomes many of the limitations of previous systems. As the user slides sideways, the multi-perspective panorama is constructed and rendered dynamically to simulate either a perspective or hyper-perspective view.

“This provides a strong sense of parallax, which adds to the immersion. We call this form of sliding sideways while looking at a street façade a street slide. Finally we integrate annotations and a mini-map within the user interface to provide geographic information as well additional affordances for navigation. We demonstrate our Street Slide system on a series of intersecting streets in an urban setting. We report the results of a user study, which shows that visual searching is greatly enhanced with the Street Slide interface over existing systems from Google and Bing.”