Bing’s Streetside feature, for exploring streets in 3D at eye level, has  gone live in the UK.

Now at Bing Maps Explore, you can glide into a London street and flip the scenery around in 3D. This is the equivalent of Google’s Street View, but using PhotoSynth and mapping everything onto a 3D plane.

Whilst still in the early stages, this is another advancement in online mapping technology, and there’s a clear path from this to heavily-interactive 3D environments.

It is actually quite nice to be able to focus on a feature, such as a building, and have the camera swoop around to centre your view, maintaining the basic 3D frame at all times, which is better than Google’s Star-Trek-style motion blur. My only complaint is that it’s very slow to load the high-quality images, making the environment less immersive and more like a stab in the dark.

Bing already has a few advantages over Google Maps – particularly the smooth scrolling, which comes from the SeaDragon technology Microsoft have been pioneering; and the simple 45-degree aerial view, which is much more useful than Google’s vertical view.