Blaise Aguera y Arcas (creator of PhotoSynth, founder of Seadragon and now Architect of Bing Maps) gave a talk at TED last week. In it he showed off some of the latest Bing Maps has to offer. He demoed the fluid zooming capabilities based on Blaise’s own Seadragon technology and the 3D capabilities provided by Silverlight. He also demoed how images and live video can be overlay Photosynth-style on top of the map (these were both made possible by the mapping application platform that was recently added to Bing Maps).
The app platform is how Bing includes Twitter, Flickr and geolocated blog content. The screen-capture above shows a Flickr photo overlaid on the Bing’s Streetview product. Google just released a similar product the other week. Both companies are taking advantage of Flickr’s huge repository of geolocated photos. In January Blaise told me that the apps are built in C# and that the API is only available internally — for now. There’s a great list of the various map apps on the Bing Maps Blog (including one for viewing before/after imagery of Haiti and for following the Olympic games) .
Blaise will be speaking at Where 2.0. The three day conference runs March 30- April 1 in San Jose. Radar readers can register with this discount code for 25% whr10pcb.. Early registration ends March 1st.
And here’s how to actually get your photos included (possibly):
And, now you want to know how you can get your photos up there. In order for your photos to potentially appear in the Streetside Photos Technical Preview, you’ll first need to setup an account on Flickr. Once you get your Flickr account set up, create a folder of images and upload them. Now, you’ll need to set your images to a specific set of Creative Common settings that allow us to consume these images with your permission. So, under the photo you’ll see “Additional Information.” By default all images are set to “All rights reserved” which means it’s your photo and we can’t use it. To change this, you need to click the edit link and change the settings to either (1) Attribution Creative Commons, (2), Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons or (3) Attribution-NoDerivs Creative Commons. Finally, ensure your images are geotagged. This will help us identify where to begin associating your image with our Streetside photos.