is a research, design, and development agency specialising in the intersection between architecture, urbanism and information communication technology. It is directed by George Metcalfe, a recent graduate of the Welsh School of Architecture.
Interests include the manipulation of the built environment through both physical and virtual infrastructures, the evolution of macro and micro socioeconomic processes in response to the information age, the future of the semantic city, the free and open source [F/OSS] software movement...and what this all means for society.
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Street Slide is a recent research project by Microsoft that allows seamless transition between the 360° panoramic ’bubbles’ already familiar from photographic mapping services such as Google’s Street View and Bing’s Streetside. Similar to the Community Photo Collections project at the University of Washington’s GRAIL Lab research which has already made it to front-line software application, the system represents another leap in re-spatialising photographic data – in this case navigable 2D street elevations, enhanced with geographic and other informational references.
The following is an extract from the research paper:
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.
George Metcalfe recently graduated with Distinction as Master of Architecture from the WSA. A freelance designer and multi-creative, he is interested in the intersection between architecture, urbanism and information communication technology.
