Bing Maps Goes Live, Microsoft Aiming to Outdo Google
By Chris Weiss
Microsoft is stepping up its game against Google. Bing Maps Beta went live a little while ago, and Microsoft is aiming to offer some new, enhanced features on its map program that are not available on other prominent map applications like Google and Yahoo.
The key component behind Bing Maps is 3-D Photosynth mapping, in which crowd-sourced photos will be used to recreate neighborhoods, bringing a new level of detail not previously seen elsewhere. The Photosynth software pulls information from pictures and creates vivid, lifelike 3-D models from them, allowing users to “explore” neighborhoods like never before.
As could be expected, availablility is extremely limited now, but the move represents a hopeful future for Internet mapping. Bing’s approach is a divergence from the Building Maker feature that Google launched a few months ago.
As explained by head software architect Blaise Aguera y Arcas: “We’re not just relying on images from cameras flown from above, or driven around on top of cars, to get images of a street. We think of all that ‘street-side’ data as just the visual trellis on top of which all this [Photosynth] stuff grows, like grapes on a vine.”
The enhancements made possible by Photosynth will help to give users a real look and feel of a place above and beyond what has traditionally been available on mapping services. [via Fast Company]
