Virtual Earth 3D Beta Launched

Lord Satri writes "Microsoft has announced the launch of Virtual Earth 3D. There are numerous screenshots to be seen, as well as a Google Earth comparison from Spatially Adjusted. You can read the Google Earth Blog on why he thinks it's not a threat to Google. C|Net's coverage and the official press release provide lots of concrete details of the product. You can also read more from the development side or see the CBS report on Virtual Earth 3D. My main gripe: Windows and Internet Explorer 6/7 only. From the official press release: 'When people visit Live Search, type a query into the search box and click the "Maps" tab, they get their search results in a map context that offers the option to explore the area using two-dimensional views (aerial and bird's-eye) or three dimensional models with Virtual Earth 3D. This new technology compiles photographic images of cities and terrain to generate textured, photorealistic 3-D models with engineering level accuracy.'"

Comments

Not a threat, but VERY cool

[Salvance]

Every once in a while, Microsoft does something right ... or at least releases something cool. When I plugged in my address (which is kind of in the middle of nowhere), up popped 3 different viewing angles of my house. Pretty detailed shots too, and in one you could even see me mowing the lawn in the backyard! I had lots of fun with this one.

Re:Not a threat, but VERY cool

[Da Fokka]

Pretty detailed shots too, and in one you could even see me mowing the lawn in the backyard!

p.And this doesn't even concern you a little bit?

Re:Not a threat, but VERY cool

[Threni]

> p.And this doesn't even concern you a little bit?

I'm sure the picture shows him safely wearing his tin-foil hat, so, temporarily at least, the forces of evil can't access his plans for world domination...

Re:Not a threat, but VERY cool

[PrayingWolf]

Every once in a while, Microsoft does something right ... or at least releases something cool.

I think you meant to say: "Every once in a while Micro$oft copies someone else's idea and tries to get all the credit".
This plagiarism seems to be the only form of R/D M$ does - and it makes me sick!

Re:Not a threat, but VERY cool

[omicronish]

Every once in a while, Microsoft does something right ... or at least releases something cool. When I plugged in my address (which is kind of in the middle of nowhere), up popped 3 different viewing angles of my house. Pretty detailed shots too, and in one you could even see me mowing the lawn in the backyard! I had lots of fun with this one.

Actually, I think it is a threat. I use Live Local/Virtual Earth almost exclusively. Here's why (adapted from a post I wrote in a previous story that didn't get much attention):

• Live Local has better controls. It was the first to add mouse wheel scroll zooming, which Google Maps has added. (I don't mind the copying, though; the more the merrier!) I can't live without the middle-click, box zooming, though. From a globe view I can zoom to my house in a few seconds with Live Local's box zooming.
• Directions between arbitrary points: Right-click anywhere to select the From and To points to find directions. Google Maps requires that I type in addresses. Problem is that I don't know the address of Paradise point at Mt. Rainier National Park, and Google Maps can't seem to find it. Note that Yahoo Maps expands upon this by letting you add waypoints, but it's too slow for me.
• Bird's Eye view. Images are taken from an airplane, so detail is awesome.
• I can perform up to 3 simultaneous map searches. This means I can see the locations of all Safeways, libraries, and CompUSAs on the same map. Useful if you intend on going to multiple places when driving.
• Live Local's direction finding seems more capable than Google's. I can find directions from Glasgow, UK to Palermo, Italy.
• Live Local has better sharing features. You can create collections of places and share them on Live Local. This might be a silly example, but some friends visited Seattle recently and wanted suggestions on places to visit. I made a collection of places for them. You can add text, images, and URLs to places on a collection, and viewers of a collection can generate driving directions between any of its places (as well as any other arbitrary point). Google has auto-saving of locations (which was added after Live Local's collections), but as far as I can tell, it does not permit sharing or customization of locations.
• UI is more customizable. Live Local's panels are removable, yielding more visible map area than Google Maps. You can't turn off the "example searches" pane in Google.

Of course it has downsides:

• Performance is worse than Google Maps. On my 1.7 GHz 512 MB RAM laptop, Live Local causes the fan to spin up far more often than Google Maps.
• Color scheme is uglier in some places (compare Tokyo road view in both Google and Live).
• Google Maps' satellite view is considerably more detailed and updated in some places, including Shanghai, Pyongyang, Ho Chi Minh City. MS appears to be countering this with Bird's Eye view, but the two are just not the same.
• I'm not sure all its features are supported in Firefox 1.5 and below; can someone confirm? But it does work in Firefox 2.0.

If you're interested in looking at satellite imagery, Google is the better choice. But if you want to find places and get directions to them, and share those places with people, I believe Live is far better.

Re:Not a threat, but VERY cool

[Instine]

This is NOT very cool.
Its google earth (which was cool, until everyone realized its no more use than google maps). On a web page. BUT as you have to download a whole heap of crap, that makes it no better than an activeX wrapper, for the Google earth API.
But what really f'ed me off is that it changed my home page to windows live!!!! Grrrr.

Re:Not a threat, but VERY cool

[Kuciwalker]

Google Earth wasn't developed at Google, either. They bought the company that developed it.

Windows only

[pubjames]

I tried to test this but it is for IE explorer only. So Google wins by default.

Re:Windows only

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

... for the 20% non-Windows, non-IE users out there, sure.

And for more than that. Half the time when I'm looking at something like this, I am doing so to send it to someone else or at least want the option of so doing. If there is a 20% failure rate every time I do that, well that is a significant problem, regardless of which browser I use.

Re:Windows only

[aclarke]

Yeah, but we're the TOP 20%. And we won't let you forget that :-)

Please explain why Microsoft is threatened?

[green pizza]

Why does Microsoft feel theatened by certain markets? I don't understand why they feel they have to compete with everything, even "markets" where there is little or no money to be made. How much money could Microsoft ever make from Virtual Earth? Why does Microsoft feel it has to compete in the games and music world when it is already making huge amounts of money selling software to 90 - 95% of the computer world?

Re:Please explain why Microsoft is threatened?

[timeOday]

Bill Gates (and by extension I suspect much of Microsoft) is very worred about missing the "next big thing" and being left in the dust. The history is that IBM gravely under estimated the PC revolution and handed it over to Microsoft, so Microsoft doesn't want to get shafted like they did to IBM. I agree this particular application doesn't seem very important, but Microsoft may be concerned in general about losing ground as an applications service provider. Apparently this new thing is based on ActiveX so personally I hope it is an utter failure.

Re:Please explain why Microsoft is threatened?

[shdowhawk]

There is a simple answer to your question...

When playing monopoly, are you content on owning half of the board when playing against 4 others? What if you never owned 3 of any of the pieces on the board, so you were never able to built those crazy hotels... would you be content then?

Microsoft IS in fact being threatened. As you yourself said, they are a software company. Google, is a software company. Microsoft made itself known by creating a fantastic piece of business software (hate to admit that.. bleh) called Office. This Program made everyone want their OWN software. You could now do your OWN taxes at home (assuming you knew how). You could write your own papers efficiently, or make a pretty slide show easily. People bought PERSONAL computers to do that. Google on the other hand took the complete opposite route on this. They represent the internet. The collective of information from EVERYONE. In a future where everything is being based on multi-tasking and the ability to do many things at once (cellphone / pda / mp3 players combo's anyone?) Google is leading the way. Need to learn something new? Google it. Want to download something new and exciting? Google it. Most importantly... who can use google? Everyone... which means less market share for microsoft.

My point is this. Microsoft is the toy you got when you were 5. It taught you a lot of things, and you had fun with it. But eventually, something new and more exciting came out. Microsoft is doing what it can, even if it doesn't make too much profit on it (if any) ... to keep itself as a household name. To keep people buying Microsoft because they know the name AND it has a bunch of "features"... even if they aren't as good, or as useable by everyone else.

Re:Please explain why Microsoft is threatened?

[Procyon101]

But they are losing their cash cows to do it!

They were the ONLY game in town in the desktop and laptop market. Now Apple has a huge chunk, and Linux desktop use is growing and becoming more competitive. They have been left behind by install and update technologies. They are now having to resort to strong-arm tactics to bill their casual-use users at every opportunity which is only pissing off their remaining customer base. This weekend I was asked by a medium sized business owner to "show him these Linux and Apple things" because he just had to spend tens of thousands of dollars because his network pulled down a patch from widows update and decided to shut itself down voluntarally... twice. Granted, he wasn't the most licensing concious guy around, but there is a customer that spends a very large amount of money on MS products that is likely to go elsewhere very soon.

Microsoft could have EASILY maintained their lead, by focusing on their core business... Hell, they could have CREATED the "next big thing" as a side effect to good product innovation. As they are, they are rapidly becoming the defacto "me-too" second rate clone of every product out there... if they keep it up they will be regarded in the same category as cheap thai knockoffs.

They have some good tech... why they don't run with it is so beyond me
WinCE, NT core, SQL Server, Office, WPF, WinFS, IE... these are great technologies, but they are understaffed and horribly mismanaged and if MS doesn't get back on the ball, they will be lose them to competition and will have nothing... not because they missed the next best thing, but because they refused to compete in their own core markets.

Navigation

[Hijacked Public]

After playing around with this this morning I can't quite get the hang of the grab and drag navigation. In photo mode (or bird's eye view I guess) it appears to limit the grab and drag range to the actual photo loaded into the frame, and the only way to move outside that is to load another photo by clicking in some kind of grid containing too-small-for-clarity thumbnails.

Maybe I'm wrong and didn't spend enough time with it, but that is a huge handicap, better photos or not. With Google Earth I can grab and drag to wherever. Half of what I want to find isn't tied to an address, it is much easier to find by following landmarks.

Some parts cool, others not

[Jugalator]

I see Virtual Earth as an application that excels in a select few areas, but in general has much less to offer.

For example, it has nifty texture mapped buildings for a number of places, but what about the majority? Conversely, Google Earth covers a large part of Earth in quite good detail, but Virtual Earth not even my capital city. Additionally, GE has a large community behind it now, and the layer features provides an extensibility that could be compared to the extensions in Firefox.

Re:Some parts cool, others not

[bmwm3nut]

I forgot about the layering that the GE community can provide. Want to bet how long it will be until someone makes a layer in GE that reads the virtual earth data and redisplays it? I'm not sure how the layers in GE work, but I bet someone just needs to have a server the GE queries and then an automated ActiveX control that will grab the virtual earth data and send it back to GE.

Accuracy levels

[PhotoGuy]

"Engineering level accuracy?" What kind of vague marketing speak crap is that? To the millimeter? To the cm? To the meter? (If I hired an engineer to do a building, I'd probably want accuracy to the inch. Does it do that?)

Can someone please put this in terms of "Libraries of Congress" or "Volkswagens" so I have some sense of perspective??? Help!

You lucky ones...

[robcfg]

After going through a huge number of windows it turns on that it cannot be installed in a spanish XP. So we'll have to wait (as usual) to try it. I hate this things... :(

Save yourself some time.

[El_Smack]

Just get the original blueprints from the Magratheans.

sdk

[warrior_s]

From the blog, The SDK is here: http://dev.live.com/virtualearth/sdk/

Opposite

[SuperKendall]

...another tool to help the terrorists!

Actually it's just the opposite - they'll spend a few years going through Active X installations and the configuration screens and it will keep them out of our hair.

Re:Opposite

[LoverOfJoy]

Or Osama will release an audio tape stating he loves this new product and even was able to find an image of himself mowing his lawn. Government agencies around the world will spend a few years going through Active X installations and configuration screens before they even start their "Where's Waldo" hunt giving bin Laden plenty of time to plan his next attack.

Great idea!

[bcmm]

This new technology compiles photographic images of cities and terrain to generate textured, photorealistic 3-D models with engineering level accuracy.

I've been waiting AGES for something like this! Thank you Microsoft, for leading the way with new and innovative technology, yet again.

why?

[Yahweh Doesn't Exist]

so they're copying google 100% except that their version won't work on my mac.

oh my god, it hurts to think of all the wasted energy in reproducing something badly.

Canada, eh?

[PhotoGuy]

Just gave it a try. IE only, active X install (versus AJAX that google uses; wait, didn't MS start all the XMLHTTP stuff themselves?), which were annoying, but in the end, the quality of the satellite views for Nova Scotia (where I live) are an order of magnitude poorer than Google Earth.

So, IE Only, Poor Canada support. I'll pass for now.

Re:Well said, but wrong.

[El_Smack]

IBM didn't get shafted, and MS didn't poison the King to become King. IBM did make a grave business error of not recognizing the direction of the market and collapsed. MS correctly predicted the future, and did well. MS doesn't want to make the same mistake IBM did, so it competes everywhere.

World wind

[plopez]

I like this one too.

http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/

Re:Reminds me of...

[saltydogdesign]

It's called photogrammetry, and Microsoft did not come up with it, though they will no doubt be filing all sorts of horseshit patents pretty soon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photogrammetry

Flight Simulator integration

[DigiShaman]

Why hasn't this been integrated into Microsoft's Flight Sim yet? You don't need to install 15GB worth of data, and the maps are always updated. Better graphics too I might add.

Re:Lost customer thread

[Hatta]

The fact that stuff like this comes out that requires Windows and IE is why I still run Windows and IE.

The fact that you still run Windows and IE is why stuff like this comes out that requires Windows and IE.

Re:Lost customer thread

[entrylevel]

Whoa.
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