Virtual Earth 6.2 has been released, with a whole host of new features. Among them:
New imagery — ”Richer bird’s eye” and new 3D imagery, but I can’t find a list of what’s been updated.
Weather integration — Real-time clouds (see more below)
Localized maps — English, German, French, Italian and Spanish.
Near-matching — Helps find locations with alternate and similar spellings.
Landmark-based routing
Rich imagery for mobile users — Their screenshot shows an iPhone, but I can’t make it work on mine. Maybe I need a specific URL?
One-click directions
The new imagery might be worth writing about, but I can’t find what’s new. However, the clouds are very cool. Fly down low in a city, look up, then wait a few seconds. Pop! There they are.
Unlike the clouds in Google Earth, these are fully 3D semi-transparent clouds. Flying through them, they look almost real — it’s very impressive.There are a few downsides, though. For one, they load in square tile areas. If you fly too quickly, they’ll disappear until the next set loads. Also, there is no way to leave them on and get a satellite view of an area from up high; if you fly very high above them, they simply go away to leave you with a clear view of the ground.
I’ll leave you with a short video demo of the clouds, shot by Frank Taylor at Google Earth Blog. With it, you can really see just how cool this feature is. He’s using a SpaceNavigator to fly through them, a tool which I strongly recommend for any avid Virtual Earth (or Google Earth) user.
Just a few days ago I mentioned that I hadn’t seen an imagery update for Virtual Earth in a while, and now we have one.
This one reportedly has a staggering 48TB worth of imagery, but doesn’t cover that many places. The list:
Orthos
Yakima, WA
Springfield, MO
Spokane, WA
Portland, ME
Grand Rapids, MI
Billings, MT
Minneapolis, MN (UltraCam Refresh)
Seattle, WA (UltraCam Refresh)
Las Vegas, NV (UltraCam Refresh)
Phoenix, AZ (UltraCam Refresh)
Tampa, Fl (UltraCam Refresh)
Vector
Vector overlays for Navteq and MDS data sources for orthos and Bird’s Eye
All mobile tiles
New British Isles Map style
3D
Tampa, FL
Only one new 3D city? Bummer. I’m dying to see the country (and world) get populated with those awesome “version 2″ cities, but they really seem to be slowing down. Hopefully they can pick up the pace and get more areas fleshed out in the near future.
Brian Timoney has made some nice updates to GulfImpact.com ahead of Hurricane Ike. Not only does it give you the location and path of the storm, but it shows all of the affected oil wells in the Gulf, broken down by company. He uses Virtual Earth to power it.
I’ve heard a lot of news stories about how gas prices are likely to shoot up due to this, and this site shows why. Great site!
According to Nate Irwin, version 6.2 of the Virtual Earth map control is coming on September 22nd. This new map control brings a lot of great features to the table, including landmark-based directions and real-time weather in 3D.
Here’s my big question, though — where’s the new imagery? Unless I’ve missed something, they haven’t added any new imagery since July, and they haven’t updated any 3D cities since June. I absolutely love their “version 2″ cities in 3D, and was hoping we’d see a steady stream of them.
It’s not nearly as large as some recent Virtual Earth updates, but there’s still quite a bit packed into this one. No new 3D cities that I know of, but a bunch of new imagery. New orthos in a handful of places in the US, all of Austria, and various cities in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. In addition, there is new satellite and Bird’s Eye imagery for a variety of locations.
I normally like to list all of the updated areas, but it’s simply too much. You can view it all on this page.
The total amount of new imagery is reported to be around 69.2TB, which is amazing! However, I don’t know how that number is computed. Is that raw imagery? Compressed? Anyone know how that figure is derived?
In any case, it looks to be another awesome update.
About two months after the first four “version 2″ cities were released, Microsoft has just unveiled Miami 2.0. Like the other four cities, it features a massive increase in the number of buildings, along with a whole bunch of 3D trees. According to the Virtual Earth 3D blog, Miami now has 46,344 3D buildings (up from about 4,000) along with “hundreds of thousands” of trees.
To be honest, I’m a bit disappointed with the pace of these new cities. They’ve bragged a few times that these cities are generated through a “100% automated process”, so I expected a few new cities per month. To only have one new city after two months is a bit of a letdown. That being said, Miami looks awesome and I can’t wait to see more!
The technology is powered in part by C3 Technologies, who explain their software as follows:
The technology is based on high-resolution aerial photography with carefully calibrated cameras. For every picture, the camera’s position and angle are calculated with extremely high precision, using a very advanced navigation system. This is what enables us to give each pixel its geographical position with decimetre accuracy. Then, using stereovision technology, we combine two sequential pictures to measure the area’s height profile.
The result is an aerial photograph with each pixel positioned in three dimensions. Over an entire city, thousands of such photos are combined into one coherent 3D model – through an automated process in our unique 3D-processor.
Thanks to all this, there is no one today who can take pictures with the same precision and speed as we can. One example is when we filmed all of Stockholm in October 2007 and created a realistic, yet zoomable and turnable, 3D model of the city in just 3 days.
It seems to be a pretty cool technology, considering cities can be created so quickly and it works on such a wide variety of platforms. The detail is far worse than what Google Earth and Virtual Earth have, though it renders trees and “any object larger than a VW bus”.
Microsoft has rolled out another enormous imagery release for Virtual Earth. Details can be found here, but the quick version includes:
