Virtual Earth
Virtual Earth is Microsoft’s answer to Google Earth. Google’s product is free, and download takes just a few minutes. I cannot find out how much Microsoft’s product costs, or where to get it (can’t be downloaded from their site). Well, it is Microsoft…
Anyway, MS’s product is in version 4, and now comes in 3D. The new 3D version of Virtual Earth is currently available for the following US cities: San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Baltimore, Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta, Denver, Detroit, San Jose, Phoenix and Houston. But Microsoft says it will expand to more than 100 cities internationally by the summer of 2007.
To build their 3D models, Microsoft contractors travelled around these cities in cars and planes capturing many images in rapid succession. These were automatically stamped with GPS co-ordinates. The images overlap by 90%, to ensure that each building is captured from multiple different angles. Each virtual cityscape requires approximately 10 million photos. Looks cool, if only I could find out how to get a copy…
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