Niagara Falls

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The Virtual Earth / Live Maps blog just pointed out how great Niagara Falls looks in Virtual Earth. I have to admit, it’s quite stunning. I thought I’d go a step further and compare it to the same shot in Google Earth.

As you’ll see, there is no comparison. I have to imagine that Microsoft has done a bit of hand-tweaking to make the falls look so good, while Google obviously has not. If they wanted, Microsoft could tweak little areas all over the world to create fake examples of how much better their product is. That being said, this isn’t even close. Virtual Earths imagery looks better, the altitude mesh is much more precise, and they have 3D buildings all around the area.

Here are the two programs side by side (click thumbnails for full-size images):

Niagara Falls in Virtual Earth
(view in VE)
Niagara Falls in Virtual Earth		 Niagara Falls in Google Earth
(view in GE)
Niagara Falls in Google Earth

Virtual Earth finding its way onto more consumer-oriented business sites

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I’m finding more and more sites lately that are using Virtual Earth as their on-site mapping program.  The latest is Bank of America (via the VE dev blog).  It’s got a unique issue in that it claims to require that you enter your City, State and ZIP, but it appears that ZIP-only will work (as it should).

Another fairly new one is Weather.com (here is the radar for my area).  However, its got one big problem – static radar images only.  A static radar doesn’t help me decide if rain is on the way, as it could be coming from a variety of different angles.  All that a static radar will do is tell me if it’s raining right now — I have windows that serve the same purpose.  (btw – if you want a nice animated radar, I’ve always been a big fan of AccuWeather)

Finally, we have Harry Norman realtors.  We used them to buy our current house and we’re big fans.  I told them a few times that they should put their listings into a Google Earth network link, as that would be great for potential buyers.  I had been putting all of our “homes to see” into GE, along with local Target stores, Publix, Chick-Fil-A and other places that we enjoy, just to see how it shakes out.  Dropping all of that into a nice GE network link would be amazingly easy, but repeated e-mails to them have gone completely unanswered.

Anyhow, here is their “Map Search”.  As you zoom in, you can see where all of the Harry Norman offices are located.  Wait, what?  Yep.  Their map shows all of their offices for you, but no houses.  A link in the corner shows how many listings would be on the map, which you can click to show in a big long list.  While I suppose it beats nothing, it’s really quite pitiful.

One final complaint – none of these maps support the Space Navigator.  At all.  As the Google Earth Blog said a while back, the Virtual Earth interface has a rather “clunky” mouse interface.  I agree completely.

All of that being said, it’s impressive to see these big companies choosing to use Virtual Earth rather than Google Maps (or Earth, in some cases).  This battle between Google and MS should only continue to heat up, which will ultimately benefit all of us in the form of better products.

Some Virtual Earth drawing tools

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Johannes Kebeck, Technology Specialist for Virtual Earth, has just released some drawing tools

to make it easier to add lines and shapes inside of VE. You can find them here.

It’s shame that something as simple as drawing basic shapes in still such a chore in VE — even this solution requires a bunch of code. Google Earth has them beat badly on this front, but they continue to make progress.

Update 6/14/07: These drawing tools were already in VE – they were just hard to find.  You have to “add pushpin”, and then change it to a poly.   This is simply UI tools for drawing for the dev community.

Want to help model a city?

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In an effort to get more cities modeled in 3D, Google has created a new category in the 3D Warehouse titled “Help Model a City“.  They’re encouraging users such as yourself to go in there and help create some of these models.  So far they have five cities listed — Ann Arbor, Michigan : Amherst, Massachusetts : Astana, Kazahstan : Brookline, Massachusetts : San Jose, California.

It seems like a good way to encourage more people to help model the buildings.  I still expect Google to create a semi-automated process to handle this (similar to how Virtual Earth does it), but in the meantime this could help get more buildings up there.

The Google Lat Long blog has more information.

Microsoft unveils “instant answer” for MSN.com and Live.com

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Following on the heels of both Google and Yahoo, Microsoft’s “Live” search now shows an interactive map as the top result if you search for a precise location (full story on their blog). While its noticeably later than Google or Yahoo’s implementation, I must give them credit for taking it a bit further than either of the other guys has.

On Live, when the map comes up it’s a fully interactive scrollable map. On both Google and Yahoo, it’s just a screenshot of the map. You need to click it to get to the “real” map.

Here are links to search for “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC” on all three search engines (that would be the White House, if you weren’t aware):

Live.com
Google
Yahoo

This technique has been Microsoft’s mojo for years now – wait and see what the other guy does, then copy it and do it just a bit better. Sadly, it tends to work. They’ve failed miserably in search thus far, but they’re always someone to keep an eye on.

Microsoft and KML support

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Whether or not Microsoft’s Virtual Earth will ever support the KML format is becoming an interesting topic.  Logic would seem to point to “yes”, but that’s not necessarily the case.

This topic was brought up at the “birds of a feather” meeting at Where 2.0 last week (discussed here

).   Their response was not great.

When the subject of KML support was brought up, the speaker from MS was in disbelief.  He said something to the effect of “no, not in our plans”, but had the look of shock that we would ask such an outrageous question – he almost seemed offended that such a topic would be raised at all.  Of course

they won’t support KML.

That being said, I’ve heard from other sources that KML is likely in their plans.  It makes a lot of sense for a number of reasons, but I could see it going either way.  It’s far too hard to share cool places in Virtual Earth, so using KML or some proprietary format to make sharing places easier would be a good move.

The state of Google Earth

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This was going to be a pretty boring post, since Google hasn’t revealed much about Google Earth lately.  I expected some big news last week at either Where 2.0 or the Google Developer Day and there was almost nothing said.  It was quite a let down.

Then this morning Google announced a huge image update! In addition to a ton of new images, they also updated the terrain layer for a few areas as well.  This makes pretty 3D terrain (like the Grand Canyon) even better.  Here is more info about the new imagery and here is more info about the terrain update.

So where does that put Google Earth?  I’d say it’s still a class above Virtual Earth (even before this update), but Microsoft is catching up quickly.   What does Google Earth need to do?

In my mind, the biggest missing feature is more HTML in the description bubble.  It seems like a small thing, but the implications are huge.  Imagine if you could drop a YouTube video in there so show what you looked like skiing down the mountain that someone is looking at.  It’d be great!  Or how about forms?  You could leave comments on files or change settings on a network link without ever having to leave Google Earth (or use the little browser that doesn’t work on many systems).

Next up is better 3D building support.  I agree that Google’s 3D buildings look better than the ones Microsoft has.  However, Microsoft has thousands more buildings, thus giving them an edge.  In addition, I like how Microsoft loads them.  Fly to a city and the buildings will pop up pretty quickly in very low res.  As you zoom in, the higher resolution data is loaded on top.  In GE, it’s high-res or nothing, which can mean quite a wait when you first visit a 3D heavy city like Denver.  Once nice thing that GE does that VE is still missing is give you a loading status.  In Virtual Earth, you never know if 3D buildings are going to come up in a minute or not – with GE, at least you know.

I consider Google Earth the king, but I love the fact that Microsoft is going to make them work real hard to stay on top. 🙂

The state of Virtual Earth

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I thought I’d start things out on here by talking about some recent insights and improvements to each of the three main topics on this blog – Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, Google Maps and Google Earth.

We’ll start with Virtual Earth.  If you haven’t used it in a few months, you need to go check it out again.  It is progressing at an amazing rate of speed.  Within just the last few weeks we’ve seen a new version be released (v5) as well as a TON of new data.

Version 5 offers some cool stuff. The most interesting to me is the info box – the description that pops up when you click an item.  You can now put any HTML in there that you want, which means forms, videos, photos, etc can all be seen in there.  This is also the case with Google Maps, but not with Google Earth where you are very limited on what you can put in there.

Their latest data update was also quite impressive.  According to their developer blog, they’ve added 11.5 terabytes of data!  This includes new high-res standard data, new bird’s eye data and a bunch of new cities in 3D.  It’s quite impressive.

All of that being said, they’re still way behind in a few areas.  I attended their “birds of a feather” session at Where 2.0 this week and came out with two very bizarre things.

First, they were showing off some new polygon-related features and how to code them.  It looked great, but I didn’t see how to assign altitude to a point so you can have it float in the air or be a side of a cube or whatever.  When I asked how it was done, they pretty much just grumbed and shook their heads.  I assume it’s coming soon, but right now polygons are flat on the ground.

Next was when they were showing off image overlays.  They showed an image overlay on the ground and then tilted down so we could see how it followed the flow the terrain.  There was an audible gasp in the room from being people so impressed.  My reaction was WTF?  Google Earth has been doing this for almost two years now.  It’s nice that VE does it now too, but why was it such a big deal?  I still haven’t figured that one out.

One other nice thing they showed off was how you can “rubberize” image overlays – stretch and skew them to fix whatever area you want.  This is sorely lacking from Google Earth and it was well-implemented.  On the flip side, it’s a pain in the butt to add any image overlay, whereas Google Earth makes it simple.

All in all, Virtual Earth is something to keep an eye on.  I’m very pleased they’re working so hard on this, as it’ll only serve to push Google even harder.   Also, the 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator is a must-have for VE, as Frank Taylor explains here.  It’s a must-have for Google Earth as well, but GE tends to have a bit better mouse control.  The mouse control in VE is quite awful, but the SpaceNavigator makes it much

better.