IVOR TOSSELL
Globe and Mail Update
Every time someone comes out with a new online mapping tool, like MapQuest or Google Maps, it goes through the three stages of use acceptance.
The first stage is where everyone goes immediately to find their own house. Then they go looking for the last place they lived, then the place before that. Then they look up the kids' apartments or, failing that, the girlfriend's place. And, satisfied that their vision of reality lines up with the computer's, users move on to stage two: saying "humph," forgetting about the whole thing and moving on to lunch. Stage three comes later; that's the part where we actually discover the tool may be useful.
Well, lucky us, we get to start the process again. A Toronto-based start-up called VirtualCity is taking a stab at the art of street-mapping, and the results are eye-opening.
The idea is simple, if ambitious: to provide street-level side-on view of an entire city, keyed to an overhead map. When a user clicks on a street location, VirtualCity brings up a photo of what she would see if she was actually standing there, looking at the buildings on either side of the road.
It works surprisingly well. You can navigate using the overhead map or by punching a street address into the search bar (though the site sometimes gets confused between "east" and "west" streets, like King Street East and King Street West). And once you're looking at a street in elevation — VirtualCity provides thumbnails of both sides of the road — you can "stroll" down the street in either direction.
The elevations aren't provided as a contiguous panorama, but as individual, overlapping snapshots — about 330,000 of them for Toronto alone. (For now, the service is limited to the big smoke — and its commercial strips at that — but the company expects to have a Montreal site ready within weeks, and is also working on the residential areas of both cities.) |
