Pocket-lint, the “largest independent gadget news and reviews site in the UK”, is reporting today that Microsoft plans to take on Google’s Street View with a “public-led” offering based on PhotoSynth technology and Silverlight to “allow users to upload geotagged images into a central database to help build detailed larger images of a given landmark” to be “connected into Microsoft's Virtual Earth service allowing you to get a "street view" of anywhere on the planet”, according to the post on Pocket-lint.

The yet-to-be-announced new technology is apparently awaiting Virtual Earth working with Silverlight, which was announced at Mix09 last week, and is set to go into beta this summer, with a full release later this year.

Pocket-lint talked to Johannes Kebeck, a Virtual Earth technology specialist at Microsoft EMEA about the project:

"The system would take the best images from a location to create a single image of a specific landmark very much in the same way Microsoft did with the Obama Inauguration", Johannes Kebeck a Virtual Earth technology specialist at Microsoft EMEA told us.
"We couldn't guarantee that all images would be used, but you could create a very good image of a given landmark like Piccadilly Circus for example from thousands of images".

While there have been sightings of Microsoft vehicles taking what appeared to be Street View type images, and at one point a technology preview of a Street View type product was released by Microsoft, up to this point there has been no indication of how Microsoft and Virtual Earth / Live Maps planned to answer Google’s popular Street View feature.

via FastCompany