Virtual Earth finding its way onto more consumer-oriented business sites

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I’m finding more and more sites lately that are using Virtual Earth as their on-site mapping program.  The latest is Bank of America (via the VE dev blog).  It’s got a unique issue in that it claims to require that you enter your City, State and ZIP, but it appears that ZIP-only will work (as it should).

Another fairly new one is Weather.com (here is the radar for my area).  However, its got one big problem – static radar images only.  A static radar doesn’t help me decide if rain is on the way, as it could be coming from a variety of different angles.  All that a static radar will do is tell me if it’s raining right now — I have windows that serve the same purpose.  (btw – if you want a nice animated radar, I’ve always been a big fan of AccuWeather)

Finally, we have Harry Norman realtors.  We used them to buy our current house and we’re big fans.  I told them a few times that they should put their listings into a Google Earth network link, as that would be great for potential buyers.  I had been putting all of our “homes to see” into GE, along with local Target stores, Publix, Chick-Fil-A and other places that we enjoy, just to see how it shakes out.  Dropping all of that into a nice GE network link would be amazingly easy, but repeated e-mails to them have gone completely unanswered.

Anyhow, here is their “Map Search”.  As you zoom in, you can see where all of the Harry Norman offices are located.  Wait, what?  Yep.  Their map shows all of their offices for you, but no houses.  A link in the corner shows how many listings would be on the map, which you can click to show in a big long list.  While I suppose it beats nothing, it’s really quite pitiful.

One final complaint – none of these maps support the Space Navigator.  At all.  As the Google Earth Blog said a while back, the Virtual Earth interface has a rather “clunky” mouse interface.  I agree completely.

All of that being said, it’s impressive to see these big companies choosing to use Virtual Earth rather than Google Maps (or Earth, in some cases).  This battle between Google and MS should only continue to heat up, which will ultimately benefit all of us in the form of better products.

Google Maps – Click and Drag Directions

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This is really cool. Once you’ve created directions in Google Maps (via a new click interface), you can drag various parts of your route. Check out the video below for a brief demonstration:

More details can be found at the Google LatLong blog.

Update to the Google Earth 3D Buildings layer

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huge_building.jpgGoogle has just pushed out their June update to the 3D buildings layer. Some cities with updates include Chicago, Christchurch (New Zealand), Karachi, Rome, Barcelona, Amsterdam and Moscow.

In addition, there is a big bug in this update. There is a building in western Turkey that looks like a normal house but is about 11 miles wide! You can view it here, but hurry — Google will likely fix it soon.

Google Earth Blog has the rest of the details about this update.

Cool new real-time lightning animation for GE

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GuiWeather has just released a network link that shows current lightning strikes (well, within a few minutes old) around the world, in the form a slick 30 minute time-animated network link.

Google Earth Blog has the details

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Complete 3D model of Rome, circa 320 A.D.

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This is both amazingly cool and horribly frustrating.  The Institute for the Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia has built a complete 3D model of the city of Rome

as it was in 320 A.D.  “Rome Reborn”, as it’s called, is astoundingly sharp and consists of billions of data points.  FTA:

“To create the digital model, researchers scanned a 3,000 square foot, 1/250 plaster model of the city – the “Plastico di Roma Antica” – which was completed in the 1970s. Because of the model’s intricacy – the Plastico’s Coliseum is only 8 inches tall — Italian engineers used laser radar originally designed to measure precise tolerances on jet parts to scan within a tenth of a millimeter. Each 6-by-6 section contained 60 million data points.”

As of now it has only been licensed to a tour company in Rome, but they’re in talks with Second Life to bring it there.  We can only hope that it might find its way into Google Earth or one of the other digital globes one day as well.

Some Virtual Earth drawing tools

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Johannes Kebeck, Technology Specialist for Virtual Earth, has just released some drawing tools

to make it easier to add lines and shapes inside of VE. You can find them here.

It’s shame that something as simple as drawing basic shapes in still such a chore in VE — even this solution requires a bunch of code. Google Earth has them beat badly on this front, but they continue to make progress.

Update 6/14/07: These drawing tools were already in VE – they were just hard to find.  You have to “add pushpin”, and then change it to a poly.   This is simply UI tools for drawing for the dev community.