There are a few times when one gets the whole lab gathered around a monitor to view an innovation and the 3D Map/Road view on Microsoft’s Virtual Earth has just been one of them.

Our previous post included a movie of the City of Brighton texture mapped in Virtual Earth, while impressive it does not communicate the intricacy of the modelling due to the automatic texturing process. If you fly into the city and switch to ‘road’ view in the options bar then the scene switches to coloured buildings and a more traditional map overlay – as the movie below of Brighton details:

This switch uncovers the detail captured in the buildings and, in our view, it is the best we have seen on any desktop system. Microsoft’s 3D Map/Road view is simply phenomenal.

To take a look yourself go to http://maps.live.com

There are a few times when one gets the whole lab gathered around a monitor to view an innovation and the 3D Map/Road view on Microsoft’s Virtual Earth has just been one of them.

Our previous post included a movie of the City of Brighton texture mapped in Virtual Earth, while impressive it does not communicate the intricacy of the modelling due to the automatic texturing process. If you fly into the city and switch to ‘road’ view in the options bar then the scene switches to coloured buildings and a more traditional map overlay – as the movie below of Brighton details:

This switch uncovers the detail captured in the buildings and, in our view, it is the best we have seen on any desktop system. Microsoft’s 3D Map/Road view is simply phenomenal.

To take a look yourself go to http://maps.live.com

As we reported yesterday Virtual Earth now includes the first UK 3D cities of any earth browser. Interestingly these cities are Brighton and Swindon which we assume have been chosen as test subjects for the technology in terms of 3D capture. In the movie below we fly over firstly the coastal town of Brighton and then on to Swindon.

I think we can safely assume that more cities will follow using their automatic capture technique and the results to date are impressive. Compared to Google Earth i think Virtual Earth has a slight edge in terms of 3D cities, purely due to the automatic nature of their capture compared to Google’s SketchUp approach.

The next 6 months will be interesting in terms of city visualisation…

As we reported yesterday Virtual Earth now includes the first UK 3D cities of any earth browser. Interestingly these cities are Brighton and Swindon which we assume have been chosen as test subjects for the technology in terms of 3D capture. In the movie below we fly over firstly the coastal town of Brighton and then on to Swindon.

I think we can safely assume that more cities will follow using their automatic capture technique and the results to date are impressive. Compared to Google Earth i think Virtual Earth has a slight edge in terms of 3D cities, purely due to the automatic nature of their capture compared to Google’s SketchUp approach.

The next 6 months will be interesting in terms of city visualisation…