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Announcing Virtual Earth 6.2 and Virtual Earth Web Services 1.0

posted by Satri on Thursday September 25, @10:36AM   Printer-friendly   Email story  Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the offering-more-and-always-more dept.
Microsoft Virtual Globe Web Mapping
Microsoft just released Virtual Earth 6.2 and Virtual Earth Web Services 1.0. The quantity of new features is huge and are worth taking a look at, here's the highlights but follow the link for the details: " # Maps for Mobile Devices. # Bird’s Eye Views and Bird’s Eye Hybrid. # Aerial Imagery. # 3D Imagery. # Geocoding and Reverse Geocoding. # International Geocoding. # Localized Directions. # Localized Maps. # Extended International Parsing Capabilities. # Expanded Number of Rooftop Views. # Near-Matching Capabilities. # Imagery Metadata. # New Virtual Earth Web Services. # One-Click Directions. # Shapes and Shape Layers. # Pushpin Clustering. # Landmark-Based Routing. # Driving Directions with Traffic-Based Routing. # Walking Directions. # Multipoint Routing. # Traffic Reports. # GeoRSS Feeds. " I expect geoblog reactions in the coming days and will share them with our users. See also related stories below, Microsoft has been very busy lately with their geoservices.

Related Stories

Upcoming Virtual Earth 6.1 Features [+]
nateirwin.net currently has a post about the upcoming Virtual Earth release scheduled for April 10th. From their summary, here is a list of upcoming features :
  • "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.
For more information and relevant links, please visit the nateirwin blog.
Impressive Upgrade to Virtual Earth 3D 5 comments [+]
The Google Earth Blog brings us news of this pretty impressive Virtual Earth 3D update. The screenshots alone should tell the story, so please head on over there for more information. As if the pics on the Google Earth Blog weren't amazing enough, they also let us know about this blog which also sports pretty amazing pics showing before and after. Update: 04/11 15:11 GMT by S : This is indeed a major update, here's the list of new items from the GEB: Improved 3D buildings, Export to KML, 3D Modeling Improved Also, Bird's Eye Enhanced, MapCruncher integration (see also SA on MapCruncher), Explore Collections, Movie Capture, Real-time Traffic, Improved KML Support. Additionally, Mapperz offers a list of improvements for the new Virtual Earth API version 6.1. For VE enthusiasts, a Slashgeo reader named Eric submitted the MapForums VE blogs monitor page.
MS Virtual Earth Shapefile Overlay, Enhanced Safari Support and More 1 comment [+]
Here's some recent Microsoft Virtual Earth related news. There's the information on overlaying data in shapefile format in Virtual Earth, also on the official MS VE blog. Then Microsoft announced Birds Eye view support for Apple's Safari browser, including the iPhone. The VE blog also provides a tutorial for: "In this tutorial I'll show you how to use Live Maps to build a Collection of Waypoints and then export them to your Portable Navigation Device." Note that MapQuest are Garmin planned a similar feature. And finally, an entry on the use of MS Birds Eye view for domestic solar energy estimation.
WorldWide Telescope Released 1 comment [+]
As the Digital Earth Blog and Ogle Earth blog is reporting this morning, a beta version of WorldWide telescope has been released. You can grab the download directly from the MicroSoft site http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/. For more information and preliminary reviews, please visit the blog links above.
Microsoft’s New Photo Geotagging Tool [+]
The Free Geography Tools blog bring us news about this new tool. From their summary : "I covered Microsoft’s old photo geotagging tool WMMX Location Stamper a while ago in this post. Location Stamper uses Microsoft’s MapPoint maps in the display, which are already out-of-date, and I said it would be nice if they could add Virtual Earth to the app but wasn’t holding my breath. Good thing, because Microsoft has apparently abandoned that program in favor of a new one called Microsoft Pro Photo Tools. This is actually more than just a simple photo geotagging tool - it’s a full EXIF header editor, allowing individual or batch editing of metadata like description, keywords, copyright, date and time, etc. But here, I’ll talk mainly about the geotagging capabilities."

For more information, please visit the blog.
Virtual Earth Usage Increasing [+]
It appears that Virtual Earth is gaining/outpacing Google Earth in the professional adoption arena. We have two more examples of this in the news this week. The Earth Is Square reports that CNN who first adopted Google Earth, is now adopting Virtual Earth. Ogle Earth also reports that China Central Television (CCTV) is using Virtual Earth to show off the locations of the Euro2008 stadiums in Switzerland and Austria, and is planning to use the same tool for the Olympics in China. Visit the links to get more information.
MSFT Virtual Earth To Be Offered With ESRI's ArcGIS Online Services 1 comment [+]
The mandown blog has a detailed examination of this announcement. From their summary : "An new press release has been published from Microsoft and ESRI which talks about Microsoft's Virtual Earth's integration into ArcGIS 9.3. Microsoft and ESRI today announced that ArcGIS users will have access to the mapping and imagery content provided by the Microsoft Virtual Earth platform inside ArcGIS Desktop and ArcGIS Server."
Photosynth is finally available! 1 comment [+]
From the GeoPDF blog : "Microsoft finally released Photosynth to the general public. This is a long awaited release for this very cool 3-D panorama creation solution. I have fooled around with OpenPhotoVR but did not have the time or patience to get it working properly. Photosynth will "synth" your world for you! Check out the Photosynth gallery to see all the cool scenes already in the archive. Be careful when you create your own...your photos will be publicly available."
Microsoft Becomes Image Data Provider [+]
From the Spatial Sustain blog : Today MapMart announced that Microsoft’s UltraCam imagery would be offered for download on the MapMart website. This announcement follows the report that Microsoft Virtual Earth data would available to ESRI users. This latest announcement leverages Microsoft’s considerable investment in imagery acquisition and places them in competition with all other imagery providers.
Virtual Earth and StreetView Widgets in OpenLayers 1 comment [+]
I found no major news on the OpenLayers front since the 2.6 release last April, but these two Fuzzy Tolerance blog entries, published earlier this summer, explain how to include Microsoft Virtual Earth and Google StreetView widgets within OpenLayers. From the first entry: "With OpenLayers you can dump the standard VE or Google Maps tiles in your application, but the VE obliques are a bird of a different feather. Hence the need for a little widget rather than adding a VE layer to OpenLayers. I had seen the Google Maps and Virtual Earth Side by Side stuff before, but I couldn’t find a good tutorial on doing it with OpenLayers. I also only wanted a one way handshake - navigating on OpenLayers would navigate on VE, but you can pan/zoom VE without effecting OpenLayers. As it turns out, it so easy to do it’s almost silly. You can see the end result here (the VE map is behind the second “+” on the right)."
Microsoft's Mundie Sees a Future In Spatial Computing [+]
Slashdot ran a story this weekend named Microsoft's Mundie Sees a Future In Spatial Computing. Their summary: "Speaking at the MIT Emerging Technology Conference, Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie explained that he sees the industry evolving into 'spatial computing,' and he envisions a 3-D virtual world populated by virtual presences, using a combination of client and cloud services. 'In a few months, the compay plans to test a new virtual reception assistant in some of its campus buildings. The assistant, which takes the form of an avatar, helps schedule shuttle reservations to get people to various locations across the 10-million-square-foot Redmond, Wash., campus. The system includes array microphones and natural language processing by which the avatar listens to the subjects and then interacts with them in real time. The system has been programmed to differentiate people by their clothing. Someone in a suit, for instance, would more likely be a visitor and not a potential shuttle rider." The GeoCLoud and Microsoft's Virtual Earth 6.2 has been discussed recently, see related stories below.
Technology: Google Introduces Reverse Geocoding [+]
Google announced reserve geocoding for the API. From the announcement: "Now, let me introduce the more advanced topic of reverse geocoding: the process of converting a latitude/longitude pair into an address. A much smaller (but important) percentage of developers will want to use a reverse geocoder to let their map users know the address for a particular point on the map, perhaps to help them fill in a form faster (why type when you can click?!). For those developers, we're now pleased to offer address-level reverse geocoding support to both our HTTP service and the GClientGeocoder class. To make it super easy to use, the interface for reverse geocoding is nearly the same as forward geocoding - the only difference is sending in a lat/lng instead of an address." See related stories below for other reverse geocoding solutions, including Microsoft's Virtual Earth and a previous reverse geocoding solution using the Google Maps API.
New Geovisualization: Microsoft Single View Platform 2 comments [+]
All Points Blog have an interesting entry on a new Microsoft geovisualization platform named the Microsoft Single View Platform. From the entry: "Microsoft SVP is an open, industry standards–based technology that provides a highly integrated foundation for a variety of data visualization solutions in the area of business intelligence, information sharing, work flow and business processes, project management and systems center. [...] The Microsoft SVP foundation architecture is based on the following core technologies: Microsoft Virtual Earth, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007; Exchange Server; Office Communications Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Windows Server" Other Microsoft geostories.
Developing Mobile Applications with Virtual Earth Web Services [+]
The Virtual Earth blog links to an MSDN entry named Developing Mobile Applications with Virtual Earth Web Services. From the entry: "The constraints of mobile device applications are very different than the traditional web or desktop applications. Unlike a desktop or web application, the screen real estate is very compact and the controls are limited in functionality. These constraints force you to rethink your user experience. Simply building a form with a bunch of buttons isn’t very useful on most mobile devices. In addition, the occasionally connected nature of the device is problematic for any application that relies on web connectivity. Because you can’t guarantee whether the device will have or maintain a connection, the standard practice is to minimize the amount of network traffic expected. Similarly, network connections to mobile devices (even 3G) are slower and more bandwidth constrained than normal broadband. This puts an even larger emphasis on reducing network traffic." See also previous stories below.
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