The Making of StreetSide in Bing Maps

Great video. I'm not a technical user of Bing Maps but I thoroughly enjoyed this sneak peek into the technicalities of Maps and Streetside. I was hoping to see talk about Photosynth and Photosynth Panoramas and how you would incorporate them into Bing Maps. Panoramas are much more than simply a photo that needs to be stitched into the original Streetside imagery; panoramas can be 360 degrees and are greatly detailed. How would these be implemented into Maps, if at all? Certainly was hoping to hear about that.

Again, great video. Looking forward to see more.

-jp

Someone needs to get all of London's CCTV cameras up and streaming on this new StreetSide tool on Bing.  Microsoft has the money, and London has the cameras!

So, be honest guys, is the 'Human Scale Debug Helper' what was bookmarked on Blaise's favorite bar as "TronBuild" during his presentation at O'Reilly Where 2.0 2010 (6:50) or does that point to one of your unreleased versions?

@jpere165, apologies if I'm only comprehending your question at a lower level, but the Photosynth panoramas are also cube mapped, in much the same way that each Streetside panorama is. Granted it isn't working against any existing -> simple geometry as of yet, but transitioning into them should be extremely similar to transitioning into the current professionally shot panoramas. I do second your request that the process actually be talked about, though. 

It's been mentioned on the Photosynth forums and blog, and Chris P. has hinted on twitter that Photosynth-hosted panoramas will be integrated into the upcoming version of Bing Maps, so Laura or Chris take note that we'll be eager to hear all about how its being done when you announce and cover the next wave of Bing Maps.

I'm also extremely interested in seeing each photo within a synth be clickable from inside of Streetview just as Flickr photos are in the Streetside Photos CTP. If the sheer number isn't too much for Silverlight to handle with decent performance, it could be the key to being able to move between synths seamlessly, being that in geoaligned synths, each camera's coordinates actually correspond to real world coordinates. If you can't load all the photos in all the nearby synths, then polling for the nearest 20 or so or the 20 that project onto surfaces currently in Streetside's viewport, irregardless of which synth they're in, would be really great.

As to the move from the D3D Bing Maps control to the Silverlight 3 app (apologies in advance for this, Chris), all I really have to say is that I really hope that hardware accelerated 3D comes to Silverlight soon (SL5?), because otherwise WebGL is going to sneak up behind you and you'll have full blown Google Earth happening inside of an HTML5 canvas over at that other map site with all the anti-plugin HTML5 advocates singing the praises of you know who. Be ready. The only hope you have of beating that is to show that you can do more with Silverlight or get better performance or something along those lines. If not then Bing Maps AJAX may suddenly surpass the Silverlight edition. What's that you say? Heresy? Don't say I didn't warn you.

Double post. Please delete this one.