Some background on how Virtual Earth creates 3D buildings

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The Virtual Earth 3D blog has a post today

that explains in detail how they create each 3D city.  From the article:

Microsoft’s acquisition of Vexcel Corporation, a 20-year old provider of remote sensing solutions, provided the Virtual Earth team with a broad background in photogrammetry, geospatial data production, and digital elevation model (DEM) generation and refinement.  The models and their texturing are generated from aerial imagery generally captured at a 15 cm ground sample distance (GSD) by planes flying at roughly 5,500 feet over the target city and capturing a minimum of 5 views for each building (top and 4 sides). Since the Vexcel acquisition, this aerial imagery is increasingly being captured using the Vexcel UltraCAM series of high-resolution digital cameras, providing Virtual Earth’s 3D display with sub-meter accuracy.

Along with being able to generate massive numbers of models per city, they’re also able to load quickly for each user.  In fact, this is one of my favorite things about Virtual Earth.  They’ll load 3D models very quickly and very low-res, then slowly sharpen them up as you zoom in on them.

Google Earth, on the other hand, can only load full-res models.  Google’s models tend to look a little better than the ones in Virtual Earth, but the quantity and load time make VE’s cities look much better.

The full article goes into much more detail, and it’s well worth reading.

StreetView now included in the Google Maps API

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Google has just announced that they have added StreetView to the Google Maps API!  It sounds like there are some neat things that can be done with it, and I’m anxious to give it a try.

The post at the Google Maps API Blog has much more information — go check it out.  If you make a cool mash-up using the new tools, feel free to share it in the comments section of this post.

Hybrid view coming to Virtual Earth’s Bird’s Eye imagery

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On April 10, Microsoft plans to release Virtual Earth version 6.1.  Among the enhancements:

  • Enhanced experiences with bird’s eye view in 3D, and new bird’s eye hybrid view.
  • Reverse geocoding for U.S. users.
  • Walking directions for North America and European Union users.
  • Traffic-based driving directions.
  • New cross-browser support.
  • Improved printing support for maps.

That’s quite a bit of good stuff.  While I’ve always been impressed with the rate of imagery added to Virtual Earth, I’ve felt that they’ve been behind Google Earth/Maps in terms of features.  Improvements like this are helping them to narrow that gap.  Many of these are things that Google Maps can already do (cross-browser support, traffic-based directions, etc), but it’s nice to see them continue to catch up.

Bird’s Eye imagery has always been a unique feature that they have, so adding hybrid support to that will be neat to see.

WorldWind finally gets road data… sort of

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One of the problems with NASA WorldWind is that it uses public domain data, and most road data isn’t public domain.  Therefore, there really isn’t any road data in the application, which makes it far less usable.

However, OpenStreetMap data is public domain, and now you get get that data into WorldWind.   It takes a few steps to get it loaded, but Earth Is Square has the details.  Hopefully they can incorporate this data into a future release of the product so that more people can take advantage of it.

Techdirt suggests Google Maps should become even more wiki-like

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About a week ago, Google started allowing users to add/edit/delete items from the map.  It’s a neat idea with a lot of great potential, but opens up the possibility of vandalism.  Timothy Lee of Techdirt has a great suggestion on how to help address the problem:

…as far as I can tell, there’s no way to see all of the markers in a particular small section of the map (say the block where I live). There also doesn’t appear to be any easy way to automatically monitor changes within a certain radius of a particular location. These features (analogous to Wikipedia’s watchlist feature) would make it a lot easier for public-spirited Google Maps users to keep tabs on map changes and quickly revert vandalism. I’d personally be happy to help police edits in the area around my apartment, but there’s currently no easy way for me to do that.

I think it’s a superb idea.  Like him, I’d be happy to watch my local area and check for bad edits, as I’m sure many other people would be happy to do.

See user-created contentThey’re quite close to having this feature already, but it’s not quite there yet.  If you click on the “See user-created content” link after performing a search, you can see all user-created items for that search phrase in your area.  However, there is no way to search for ALL user-created items in an area, or way to narrow those items down by date.  I think a simple process would work:

  • Let me define an area — a simple bounding box would work.
  • Give me an RSS feed for changes/additions/deletions in that area.
  • I’d drop that RSS feed into Google Reader and always know about changes to locations near me.

It seems pretty simple.  Google, are you listening?

March Madness in Google Earth

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NCAA Team Locations in Google Earth

The Google LatLong blog has just released a KML that maps the location of all 65 teams in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.

It’s a pretty simple file, but it’s interesting to see them all placed on the map.

You can download the file here

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Google Chart API now does maps

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The Google Chart API has just released a new version. Among the new features:

  • No limit on the number of requests.
  • Support for maps! USA state maps, other country maps, world maps, etc.

It’s quite slick. Click on the image on the right to see a chart of the states I’ve lived in (the lighter the color, the longer ago I lived there). The chart was built by simply crafting this URL.

There are some neat possibilities with this, especially since you don’t need to worry much about usage. More information can be found on the Mapperz blog

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or by reading the official Google Chart API documentation.

MapQuest keeps trying, but still can’t get it quite right

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I’ve been quick to give MapQuest credit for effort, as they’re really trying to catch up the big boys now that their lead is quickly shrinking.

Yesterday they introduced live traffic. It looks very similar to the traffic info on Google Maps, but with more detailed information. The screenshots look pretty nice:

MapQuest Traffic: MiamiMapQuest Traffic: Miami

Here’s the problem — it didn’t work right away. I refreshed and reloaded and zoomed around for a while before I could make the “Traffic” checkbox appear. I later found another page on their site that gives more information about this feature. I thought I might find the answer there, but instead I found this:

Traffic List to Come

Fortunately, they mark the traffic-enabled cities with a traffic light, in a virtually identical manner as Google. A quick glance seems to show that they have more cities than Google, but not by a wide margin.

The real test, of course, is who gives better data? Here is a side-by-side shot of Atlanta using Google Maps and MapQuest:

Google Maps vs. MapQuest for Atlanta traffic

Assuming their data is accurate, the clear winner appears to be MapQuest. Google has much of the highway in gray (“no data”), while MapQuest is showing data for everything. In addition, MapQuest has the clickable icons so you know exactly what the problem is.

For me, however, 95% of my Google Maps traffic usage is from my cell phone while I’m on the road — Google Maps Mobile is very useful. As far as I know, MapQuest has nothing to compare to that. With that in mind, Google Maps will still be the winner by default for when I’m on the road, but I might give MapQuest a try next time I check traffic info from the house.

Edit 10:08pm, 3/18/08 – MapQuest does have a mobile product to compare to Google Maps Mobile, and it’s called MapQuest Navigator.  It appears to be a little better than GMM, but it costs $50/year and works on a rather small selection of phones.

Add new locations to Google Maps

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A while back, Google Maps gave people the ability to edit the locations of businesses

.  If you know of a local business that has moved or closed, you can edit it on the map.  These screens show me removing a local Dairy Queen that recently closed:

Find Dairy Queen listingDairy Queen information bubbleEdit Dairy Queen listingRemoving Dairy Queen

Now they’ve enhanced the user editing feature of Google Maps and now allow you to add new items to the map.  I wanted to add one, but the few new places near us were already in there.  However, adding a new location is very easy:

  • Search the listings.
  • Click the “Add a place to the map” link at the bottom of the left column
  • Drag the marker to the location of the business, fill in the details, and submit it.
  • That’s it!

Here are a few screens of how that would be done:

Click the Add button in the lower left cornerDrag the marker to the proper location and fill in the info

With any of those editing features, Google still keeps a copy of the original listing, along with a record of each change that is made.  All of this will only serve to make the data in Google Maps even more accurate for everyone to use.

Read an entire magazine in Google Maps

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ZkimmerThis is a very creative use of Google Maps — all of the pages of a magazine tiled onto the surface of the map, to let you zoom and skim through the entire thing.

The site is Zkimmer.  It’s certainly a unique concept, though I have to question the usefulness of it.  I think there are a lot of interfaces for reading a magazine that are superior to this.  However, I think that this site was probably going for more “unique” than “useful”, which I’d tend to agree with.

One thing that would help is if they enabled the scroll wheel on my mouse.  In Google Maps (and many Google Map applications), I can use the scroll wheel to zoom in and out. On this site, it doesn’t work.   A concept like this involves a lot of zooming, so this would make it much easier for me to use.

Google Maps Mania has more information.