Tag: virtualearth

Freeway Ramps

No application is really drawing nice ramps yet, but the smarts you can see in Google’s maps show that the data has the potential to support some nice visuals. Having played with doing this sort of thing in an application for work I can tell you that it’s no easy task. The data may be there, but it’s not straightforward. Someday I would imagine that the shapefiles for these highways will be in 3d and it’ll be possible to do a fully dimensioned render and style a 2d view appropriately. Then these things will really look nice. Well before then someone’s going to come out with something that looks really nice in all but the corner cases, though. The programmers working on this stuff are too clever not to.

basically, live maps and yahoo maps are incompetent. funnily, no mention of mapquest, but then their cartography always sucked particularly bad.

VE Santa

wherein MS tries second life style fail.

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.

Avi Bar-Zeev joins VE

In this current job search, one of the big companies actually surprised and impressed me, not only in their offer, but throughout the process, the people and professionalism. The 2 days of on-site interviews weren’t as much about testing my coding skills as they were about vision, work styles, and that ever-elusive “fit.” Turns out, I actually had fun. And in the end, my bosses-to-be offered exactly the kind of role I wanted with the freedom to define it myself — new, challenging, and some potentially very big wins on the horizon, straddling both R&D and productization with the goal of adding value wherever I can Avi has contributed in big ways to some pretty well known software projects like Keyhole and Second Life. I’m looking forward to seeing what he sinks his teeth into next.

they need all the help they can get.

KML in Live Maps

The CNET author comments that the map loads slowly in Live Maps. To compare I loaded the same KML file in Google Maps and it was indeed much quicker (15 seconds and 5 seconds respectively). But then I noticed something interesting – on Google Maps the polygons representing the parks didn’t load at all. Live Maps took longer as it was reading, parsing, and displaying the entire KML file. Its nice to see Live Map’s KML support coming along as quickly as it is!

ha. ms boasting how they do better with KML than we do on maps. that should get things fixed quickly, i presume

Map attention data

Hotmap shows where people have looked at when using Virtual Earth, the engine that powers Live Search Maps: the darker a point, the more times it has been downloaded. It is a pretty cool idea. The heat maps clearly focus on high population areas, roads, coastlines, rivers, country borders, and other items of interest.

interesting. we should do this with a site that has actual market share

Towards the Geoweb

heh. the economist calls my work on kml standardization “the road to web 3.0”.
2007-10-18: Mining Information from Collections and KML

Among the results were many amazing links that completed my research by taking me to geo-referenced content on the web; the Rome honeymoon Collection lead me to this great photo of the fountain and this KML file from Google’s keyhole BBS lead me to this stunning Panorama of the area.

I hope this brief overview helps get you started with this new feature in Live search maps. I find it to be one of the most fun and useful (I’m biased as I work on the VE Collections team), and when combined with other features like 3D Birds eye navigation the line between research and leisurely exploration get pretty blurry

very commendable how they talk about the geoweb.