SIGGRAPH 2010
Street Slide
Browsing Street Level Imagery

Johannes Kopf     Billy Chen     Richard Szeliski     Michael F. Cohen
Microsoft Research     Microsoft     Microsoft Research     Microsoft Research

A multi-perspective street slide panorama with navigational aides and mini-map.



Abstract

Systems such as Google Street View and Bing Maps Streetside enable users to virtually visit cities by navigating between immersive 360° panoramas, or bubbles. The discrete moves from bubble to bubble enabled in these systems do not provide a good visual sense of a larger aggregate such as a whole city block. Multi-perspective "strip" panoramas can provide a visual summary of a city street but lack the full realism of immersive panoramas.

We present Street Slide, which combines the best aspects of the immersive nature of bubbles 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.
@article{Kopf2010,
    author  = {Johannes Kopf and Billy Chen and
               Richard Szeliski and Michael Cohen},
    title   = {Street Slide: Browsing Street Level Imagery},
    journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2010)},
    year    = {2010},
    volume  = {29},
    number  = {4},
    pages   = {96:1 -- 96:8},
}
		
   
Paper
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