MapQuest Adds Streetview-Level Imagery

New York, NY test of MapQuest 360 View. While some images lack clarity, the orange proximity bubbles are useful.

From the MapQuest blog:

360° View provides fantastic panoramic views (360° horizontally and 160° vertically) of any given image within the 360 View coverage area (initially 30 cities and 15 suburbs across the United States with more to come) … Best of all, MapQuest 360 View “just works” without requiring any non-standard 3rd party player downloads.

All Points Blog notes that the source of the imagery is Immersive Media, makers of the Dodeca2360 we’ve discussed before.  Microsoft’s new Bing Maps is pretty impressive with its accuracy and bird’s eye view all over the US, but as James Fee points out, 360° View does not require special installs like Silverlight to work:

Take that Bing Maps and your 3rd party player download.  MapQuest works without any Silverlight player to get in your way… except of course it uses a 3rd party player called Flash.  I suppose this plays into Adobe’s assertion that their 3rd party player download is included by default in many browsers by default.

With Google Maps tripping down the quality scale, while adding 3D cities functionality and increasing the quality of its StreetView, this seems like the logical next step for MapQuest.

This story written by Maitri Erwin

Maitri Erwin is technology director at a geospatial and engineering services company, researching the visual representation and simulation of 3D data. Previously, she was geologist, geophysicist and geovisualization expert at a large, multi-national oil & gas company. Maitri is also Indian Languages advisor to Project Gutenberg, the oldest producer of free electronic books.

Graphics city, geospatial, immersive media, mapquest, maps