The Windows Live Local Preview ups the ante on the previously reported VirtualCity.ca (see post on Virtual City here). The Live Local Preview is only available for Seattle and San Francisco thus far, but the service (perhaps less practical than VirtualCity’s) has distinct experiential advantages. Instead of the side-on streetscape views focussed on the built form and shops, the Live Local Preview gives an experiential view down the street, with smaller views to left and right – and you can also essentially walk your way around with the detailed airphoto serving as a map. As you move location, the view changes relatively smoothly, essentially resembling video footage or a photo sequence of your walk. If you don’t choose “Walk” from the drop down window, you end up confined behind a car’s steering wheel looking through the windshield (boring!). Switch to “Street” view on the airphoto and you’re given the streetscape on either side as a continuous photomontage (if you’re zoomed in close enough), but it’s a bit small and couldn’t get it zoomed in any further. Using the mouse wheel lets you zoom in and out. On my Mac the interface was still a little clunky and unresponsive, but being a Windows release no doubt it’s optimized for Internet Explorer.

This is yet another step towards the seamless exploration of a city from a computer. Combine features of VirtualCity.ca and the Live Local Preview and you’re really getting somewhere. Some might tend to think that this suggests that at some point in the future no one will bother to explore their own city, and that all of the secret hidden locales of a city will be bared and exposed to the world, and that perhaps this will somehow ruin them. There’s an argument for saying that, but I’m not buying it. The amazing record that these sites are creating of certain cities at certain times is nothing short of amazing. The spatial and social experience of the city will always endure over virtual copies, especially so since the virtual copies are not even meant to replace the physical in the first place, they are tools enabling understanding, comprehension and evaluation of the city, while at the same time being a documentation of the unique physical reality of each city (at the human level) of extreme value.

Props to Tone for the heads up!