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Times seem to be changing, hopefully we offer an unbiased point of view on virtual cities and digital earths and at the moment Microsoft’s Virtual Earth is increasingly becoming the ‘Earth’ of choice for our research demo’s. The reason behind this is their ever increasing list of cities featured in fully texture mapped 3D.

The movie below provides a fly-through of Eastbourne on the South Coast of the United Kingdom and the latest of a slightly eclectic list of UK locations to be featured:

Music by The Tartan Rascals.

This months updates from Microsoft include:

Canada: Hamilton, Quebec, Toronto (Montreal is on the way in our next release)

Europe: Toulouse France, Eastbourne UK

United States: Birmingham, Huntsville, Montgomery, Mobile, Phoenix (expanded), Arden, Denver (expanded), Ft. Lauderdale, Jacksonville, West Palm Beach, Tallahassee, Fort Myers, Tampa West, St Petersburg, Coral Gables, Cape Coral West, Pembroke Pines, Orlando, Hialea, Columbus GA, Jackson, Oak Park IL, Rockford IL, Ohare IL, Baton Rouge, Shreveport New Orleans, Metarie, Jersey City, Elizabeth, East Ruth, Newark, Paterson, Brooklyn, Niagara Falls, Portland (expanded), Nashville, Chattanooga, Milwaukee

See our previous posts on Swindon and Brighton, New York and Buffalo for more info on cities in Virtual Earth.

7 Comments

  • steve says:

    I’m so tired of these swoopy-swoopy demos. Every virtual city is swoopy motion-sickness over a whole bunch of anonymous rooftops.

    Every virtual city falls apart into mucky rubbish when you go to street level. I am only interested in street level. Swoopy is useless.

    I don’t want to know what my neighbour’s rooftop air conditioning unit looks like.

  • asolitarywave says:

    I kind of agree with steve. Who makes these videos? is it the good people at digitalurban or are they release by microsoft, google etc? They’re just a bit long and boring, and the compression means they don’t look as crisp as they might do. And as steve says, you just want to go down to street level, and see what it looks like at that level – from on high it’s pretty, but pretty useless

  • asolitarywave says:

    Actually, having just been and checked, it’s not that bad at street level – takes a while to cache though

  • Andy says:

    The movies are created in real-time to provide a quick overview of the various models. We create them in-house before writing the post.

    They are currently all air based views as the technology of Virtual Earth is not yet applicable for street based capture.

    For street models you need a ‘game engine’ and thus our Oblivion movies.

    In general they are aimed at providing a general overview of the model and in the case of both Virtual and Google Earth this is generally ‘air’ based.

    The length is generally kept to 1.30 or so – but we have made a note on the ‘boring’ comment.

    🙂

    Andy

  • asolitarywave says:

    Hey. Don’t mean to be too critical – after alll, I do watch them all! ;-). But I prefer the dresden movie, which shows you how good (or not) the model is close to…

  • Andy says:

    No worries – i made the Dresden movie with your comments in mind 🙂

    Thanks for reading the blog btw..

    Andy

  • I kind of agree with steve. Who makes these videos? is it the good people at digitalurban or are they release by microsoft, google etc? They’re just a bit long and boring, and the compression means they don’t look as crisp as they might do. And as steve says, you just want to go down to street level, and see what it looks like at that level – from on high it’s pretty, but pretty useless

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