Street View may have Street Slide as competitor

We all know and use Street View on almost daily basis. It is a very useful feature specially when friend's instructions are not quite clear.

Soon we may have an alternative for Street View. Of course it is coming from Microsoft and eventually we can expect to see it as part of Bing Maps. This alternative is called Street Slide View. When used for first time is resembles Street View (something to be expected - there are not too many different ways to look around in 3D) but the difference is obvious when you turn 90 degrees and zoom out. Then you see a side view of the street.

In this view user can pan up and down the street. By zooming in standard "bubble" view will be used again.
This is a basic view but it can be extended with display of locator map, street addresses and images representing stores for examples.

I find this way of navigation quite nice and easy. It would be nice to have this functionality right now but I guess we will have to wait a bit.

To get a more complete understanding of Street Slide have a look at this video.



For more details (including diagrams and formulas) check the Microsoft Research web site paper.  


I would like to see Street Slide for New Zealand but I won't hold my breath...

Bump Mapping Toolbox and articles

You may be familiar with Jeffery Nighbert's paper about bump mapping. It was published in 2003 and results produced using this method are always very effective. Original paper showcase this very nicely as shown on picture below. This paper was additional handout material for Cartography with ArcGIS course whenever I taught this course.

After long wait ESRI has finally produced a Toolbox for ArcGIS Desktop that will help you to create maps like one above. Further more there are now three articles about bump mapping on Mapping Centre and they should be a compulsory reading for ArcGIS users with special interest in cartography.

• Introducing the ArcGIS Bump Map Tools
• Symbolizing the Bump Map
• A concise history of Bump Mapping by Jeffrey Nighbert himself.

Now all you have to do is to download it from here and start producing beautiful maps. Good luck and feel free to send me the samples of your maps and will post them up here.