Microsoft is working on a new technology, dubbed Street Slide, aimed at reshaping the street-level mapping space currently dominated by Google Street View and Microsoft's Bing Streetside.

The company plans to present the technology at SIGGRAPH 2010 later this week. The big advantage of Street Slide is that it allows users to position and change the viewpoint of the camera, rather than relying on the limited view panorama that current technologies utilize. Multi-perspective is the name of the game with Street Slide and looking at the demonstration video, the difference between the old method and the new method is immediately apparent.

Check out this Street Slide video:







While the improved contextual viewpoints of Street Slide could be useful in any context, the real benefit is on the mobile side. MIT's Technology Review spoke with the founder of EveryScape, a startup that captures panoramic imagery of buildings, who has already created a version of Street Slide that is compatible with the iPhone. According to EveryScape's tests, Street Slide helped people find places on unfamiliar streets 17 seconds faster on average than on Google's StreetView.

We look forward to seeing Microsoft's full paper and presentation at SIGGRAPH, and hope that some of this technology makes its way into Bing Streetside soon.

What do you think of Microsoft's latest take on street-level mapping?