As a result of various requests we have started making some of our exclusive print panoramas available for purchase – and just in time for the holiday season!

First off is a unique of 35 x 20 inch panoramaic print of Trafalgar Square, London. This is being offered for a limited amount of time so if your interested grab it quick, an exclusive from Digital Urban.

Offered at $22.99 in association with Cafe Press you can order it now.

Click here to take a look around the scene before you purchase in Quick Time Virtual Reality.

Microsoft Labs have released a technology preview of their Photosynth application. As we mentioned in our previous post on the subject Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.

Developed as a collaboration between Microsoft and the University of Washington the three dimensional space aspect is the key to Photosynth and its inevitable integration with Microsoft’s already impressive 3D Earth.

The movie above illustrates us utilising the the technology preview of St Marks Square Venice, of note is the point cloud when you fly around the scene. The full release seems full of potential to not only change the way we view photographs of the cityscape but also navigation. If these photographs can be tagged with additional information it could present a intuitive system for urban management and visualisation – all from simple photographs.

We all knew it was coming, David Maguire of ESRI’s forthcoming own Virtual Earth – ArcExplorer – mentioned some time back that Microsoft were ‘hoovering up data’, but now its out in Beta Release, Microsoft’s Virtual Earth 3D is impressive. Running directly in the browser (IE, XPSP2 only) Microsoft currently feature 15 cities in 3D, but not the Google Earth type 3D, fully texture mapped 3D direct from the server.

Where as Google Earth’s 3D Warehouse allows similar detail, you have to download individual buildings and slow down is notable when over 5 or so landmarks are selected. Microsoft’s Virtual Earth however streams in the data in such a way that performance is impressive considering the amount of textures on display.

It is too early to do a Google vs Microsoft comparison, but for shear eye candy Virtual Earth is ahead of the game, albeit to a limited number of users. How did they make all of these models? Its basically all down to money. City building is still time consuming but if you have enough corporate backing they can be built and visualised. Below we feature a flythough of Boston for all those Firefox or Mac users out there that are unable to use Virtual Earth:

The question now is what happens to all the other visualisation companies building cities out there? Sure there will still be a market for high end visualisation but the bar just got raised, combine this with the forthcoming Microsoft Photosynth and a number of people (including myself) must be getting twitchy and looking at their CV’s.

Time for a new job? Do you want fries with that?

As a side note, they have not featured London yet, and we have a model ready to roll if anyones interested, they do however feature the London Eye which is back to front. Its good to know that even the big players need a little help sometimes..

Thanks goes to Frank from the Google Earth Blog for the heads up regards the beta release, we were too wrapped up modelling a church in Newham, London, to notice. A movie of which will be online soon…