-
The Microsoft Virtual Earth team will be at the Inman Real Estate Connect show in New York City, next week. I have two sessions and the 3rd will be done by my counterpart, Mark Merchant. Also, Matthew Quinlan, Virtual Earth Group Product Manager, will be participating in a panel about Real Estate Search. We’ll have a booth in the case that you want to stop by and chat, as well. The sessions are as follows: Wednesday, January 7, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm Virtual Earth at Work See how leading real estate companies are taking advantage of innovative tools and technology to create immersive websites that drive their business. {Merchant} Wednesday, January 7, 1:15 pm – 2:15 pm Leverage the Power of Virtual...
-
As Santa heads north for his annual slumber and we’re all left with buyer’s remorse and daunting credit card bills we can now reflect on something positive: how Christmas was changed this year for the better with a 3D version of tracking Santa using Microsoft Virtual Earth . And, hey, I was stoked – I got my application featured on MSN.com, so Merry Christmas to me! It started with The North Pole – A Virtual Earth Christmas Experience . Now, The North Pole Experience wasn’t that hard – Tom [Grimes] (and his Caligari friends) built the models, I crunched the map tile overlays and then wrote the code to pull everything together. But, tracking Santa was way more difficult because of the time constraints...
-
We’ve been doing some housecleaning the last 2 months with some of our road network data. As a result, a small blog post to let you know of a HUGE refresh / release (48TB worth) of all tile sets where vector information is included – Road, Hybrid Aerial, and Hybrid Bird’s Eye. Thus, we’re cleaning up the streets (as it were): Global vector data updates. Multi-lingual tile sets for all zoom levels (French, Italian, German, Spanish). Japan localized tile sets. All oblique (Bird’s Eye) photography reprocessed with new road labels (minus Japan). New data source for the following countries: Greece Estonia Latvia Lithuania Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia Slovakia Hungary Slovenia Croatia Bosnia and Herzegovina...
-
To those of us who live in the Pacific Northwest it’s no secret that there is a HUGE opportunity for any of the Southern states to bring their Mexican restaurants up here and make huge bucks – we’re waiting, nay dying. Please? Growing up in San Diego with the likes of Super Sergio’s and Roberto’s not to mention my frequent trips to Dallas with La Hacienda Ranch or even On The Border and then moving to Seattle where people settle for Taco Bell as great Mexican food (no knocks on TB, it’s good and I frequent it) but something just doesn’t sit right with me. Then, there’s Qdoba . The Virtual Earth North American Sales manager claims it’s his “favorite burrito place and loves coming to SeaTac to...
-
Coldwater Creek just launched their snazzy new store locator using Microsoft Virtual Earth just in time for the post holiday bargain shopping rush. Once getting to the store locator page you’ll get a static map image with each state being clickable (or you can select the state of interest from the pull down menu). Where’s Virtual Earth? It’s in the “See Details” link for each store (and don’t even start saying, “The Devil’s in the details.”). Jokers. Clicking “details” for the individual store on the right will drop you down to an anchor tag for that store, load the Virtual Earth map centered on the store location with custom icon and change the hours for that store on the left (quite detailed...
-
As a follow up to The North Pole – A Virtual Earth Christmas Experience , the boys and I created a Santa Tracker to track Old St. Nick on his trek around the world hosted by MSNBC ( direct link to application here in the case you can find it on MSNBC ). As Ed Young would say, “we’re gonna take this to a whole ‘notha level.” Quite literally, in fact. Because this Santa tracker is updated dynamically and Santa’s sleigh is elevated to illustrate his magical flying capabilities – not to mention the elves worked extra hard to change the pushpin blip on a map into a 3-Dimensional object inclusive with real reindeer (Rudolph leading the pack), Santa himself and a bag full of presents. After all, they...
-
Helmets strapped on? For some time Microsoft has had a relationship with Dassault for publishing consumer 3D models into Virtual Earth using 3DVia . When you install the Virtual Earth 3D Managed Control you have the option of downloading 3DVia free of charge and then off you go and create models. Well, if you’ve never created your own 3D models the task can be quite daunting. Dassault has finally changed that with the latest release of 3DVia. The video below illustrates getting a model into Virtual Earth in 3 easy steps. Find your location. Find your model. Publish to Virtual Earth. Turn up your speakers for full effect. Double click for full screen view. What makes this so simple is (a) leveraging...
-
The beta release of Vodaphone’s Pocket Life is now available for free download . Pocket Life is a web and mobile service that offers a seamless, integrated experience for communication, social networking, location based services, street and satellite mapping. Pocket Life was designed around your group of friends, allowing you to communicate and interact in ways never before possible. Seamless synchronisation of the information across web and mobile devices as well as synchronisation across selected social networks is a cornerstone of Pocket Life. You maintain full control of what you share by placing your contacts in Groups and only sharing what you enable with specific Groups. Register on the...
-
The open source project dubbed Deep Earth has been officially released . The project puts Microsoft Virtual Earth in a Silverlight UX allowing for incredible visual and scalable geospatial data visualization. DeepEarth is a mapping control powered by the combination of Microsoft’s Silverlight 2.0 platform and the DeepZoom (MuliScaleImage) control. At its core, it builds on these innovative technologies to provide an architecture for bringing together layers for services, data providers, and your own custom mapping elements together into an impressive user experience. Also featured are in depth examples of how you can leverage Virtual Earth Web Services to take advantage of advanced GIS service...
-
A little token of our nod to the holidays. Check out the site built with a Silverlight interface with post cards highlighting our imagery from our the world. Click on any of them to be redirected to Multimap’s implementation of Virtual Earth imagery on Multimap.com. If you don’t like Multmap, you can use the Virtual Earth only version . If you don’t like Virtual Earth, you can use the Multimap only version . CP
-
Perhaps you’ve heard that the Live Labs team launched a free version of the Seadragon browser for iPhone …perhaps not. While the viewer is awesome and provides a killer photo viewer (arguably better than what comes with the iPhone) it also has Microsoft Virtual Earth included natively in the application. The application lets you navigate the world in Road, Aerial and Hybrid modes (sorry, no Birds Eye). You can set your location using the iPhone GPS at startup and it will drop a pin on that location. You can pinch the screen to zoom in and unpinch the screen to zoom out. Double touch recenters and zooms on the respective location. Also, if you physically turn the device the map will turn with...
-
Microsoft Virtual Earth and MSNBC are changing the game this year when it comes to tracking Santa. You’ve all seen the NORAD Santa Tracker and while that’s been fun over the years, well, it has gotten a bit stale. So, a few of us here in the Virtual Earth Product Group decided it was time to spice things up and build a more immersive 3D tracking mechanism for Santa and his reindeer. Not only that, but we went ahead and recreated a 3D version of Santa’s Village at The North Pole . Fly on up to The North Pole and check it out ! Depending on your connection speed, you could see some latency but on my pithy Linksys wireless connection using Comcast from Redmond I was able to get the whole application...
-
Steve Milroy will be presenting at the VS Live conference for Visual Studio Developers in San Francisco, CA on Wednesday, February 25. The topic - “Mapping/Geospatial Solutions with the Microsoft Platform.” You can register for the event here on the VS Live Web Site . Helpful Links: Registration Agenda Conference Page CP
-
Here’s some sickness. I’m sure the first time you saw Microsoft Virtual Earth you were thinking, “Wow, is this going to integrate with Microsoft Flight Simulator ?” Then, if you’ve ever seen me or one of my colleagues demonstrate Virtual Earth 3D you’ve probably seen us show off our Xbox controller support which then had you asking, “WHEN is this going to integrate into Flight Simulator??” I know because I still get asked those questions. I don’t have a timeline for that or any reason to believe it will happen, but Omri Fima pushes the game developer community a bit closer to making it a reality. Omri has built out what he is dubbing the “Geographic Application Framework for XNA ”. What is XNA...
-
Whoa. I have an idea for a new use of Microsoft Virtual Earth . Let’s say a mysterious orb is screaming through space on its way to crash land somewhere on Earth. You could actually determine where the orb was going to land given the speed of the orb and the rotation of the Earth (and some other math and physics). Perhaps it’s Manhattan. Then, let’s say you wanted to show the orb’s trajectory and flight path as it zoomed through space and landed in Manhattan – you could use Virtual Earth 3D for this. Film worthy, no? Well, 20th Century Fox thought so and did exactly this in their remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still which released on Friday. You can actually see Virtual Earth briefly in this...
find content in Bing community
Blog Recent Posts
Tag Cloud
Links
Other Virtual Earth Blogs
Navigation Links
Blog Links
Twitter
Blog Archive List
