Entries tagged with live maps - Channel 10

Photosynth Comes To Live Maps

sarahintampa — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 02:24:00 GMT

There’s a new feature now available on Live Maps: Photosynth! The Microsoft Live Labs technology, Photosynth, which launched publicly back in August, allows you take your photos and turn them into rich, 3-D experiences. Now, with the new Live Maps integration, you can explore the world in the very same way as you explored your own synthed photos.

As you navigate in a map or zoom in or out in a particular location in Live Maps, you can choose to display pushpins for each Photosynth available in that area. You then just click the “launch Photosynth viewer” link to dive in and start exploring those synths.

You can try this now in Seattle, in Cairo at the Sphinx, in Vatican city, or at the Leaning tower of Pisa, for example.

The Sphinx – Cairo, Egypt

Photosynths are not shown by default in Live Maps, but are a part of the user-generated collections feature. Turning them on is easy, though - here’s how:

1) Search for for any location where synths may be available or manually drag your map there. Try “Paris,” for example.

2) Turn on Explore mode (Click Collections –> Explore collections). This turns on all the user-generated content, not just synths.

3) Filter to display just synths: At the top of the Explore panel, press the Photosynth button.

4) Now you’ll see just the synths display.

5) Enjoy!

Note: to explore Photosynths, you must have already installed the Photosynth viewer found here.

New Release of Live Maps

sarahintampa — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:37:00 GMT

The Virtual Earth team has just made a big round of updates to their platform, some of which affect the consumer-facing side of VE: Live Search Maps. One of the updates that I think will be immediately useful has to do with communities. Community-submitted collections are now going to be immediately indexed after uploading so they can be searched instantly. Live Maps will also be using this collections data to further augment business search results when there aren't any business listings that exist for the term you entered. That will definitely be helpful.

I’m also glad to see that they've added the ability to get multi-point directions which is handy when you’re planning a route that has several different stops along the way. However, I'm personally the most excited about the new "landmark hints" feature. I believe that this must have been added in just for me. When I’m going somewhere new, I hate having to look for street signs. Now, thanks to this excellent feature I see "landmarks hints" to help me find my way. Here in the U.S. only, the landmark hints will include things like gas stations, hotels, restaurants, convenience stores, grocery stores, and car dealerships. So now I'll know to turn RIGHT at the McDonalds, not at some street. Awesome! I'm going to use this new feature today to map my trip to Blogorlando.

The Live Search Maps update also includes several other improvements like better geocoding precision, more aerial updates and bird's eye views (my favorite), updated vector data (roads and places), localized tiles for Western Europe which show place names in the local language, and a lot of other great new features. For the full run-down, check out Chris's blog. In the meantime, I'm off to pack for my trip...and I can finally be happy that this time I won't get lost!

Looking at V2 Cities in Virtual Earth

sarahintampa — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:35:00 GMT

At this year's Virtual Earth and Location Summit, hosted by Microsoft Research in May, Steve Stanzel of the 3D Imagery Group gave a presentation about the new Virtual Earth released earlier this year. Virtual Earth version 2, in case you don't know, is a pretty impressive step forward in this mapping product. There are currently over 300 cities in 3D and many of them are already "V2" cities. In a V2 city, the texture qualities are greatly improved, making the buildings look more real. V2 cities all use what's called "oblique" imagery, aka "Bird's Eye View," that presents the imagery at a 45 degree angle, letting you clearly see the sides of the buildings. In V2 cities, you can also toggle street and building labels.

Another difference between V1 and V2 cities is the increase in the number of buildings displayed. In the earlier version of VE, only the taller buildings were rendered, but one and two-story structures were largely ignored. Now with V2, the number of buildings in a city has increased from about 6,000 to over 150,000, according to this Radar post blogged from the Summit. In addition to the buildings, trees have been rendered and placed in specific spots based on the height and diameter of the real trees. The trees are a nice touch, but its the sheer number of buildings that make a V2 city stand out - they have far more buildings that any competitive mapping product.

At the time of launch, four cities received the V2 face lift: Vegas, Denver, Dallas, and Phoenix, and today there are a total of seven (Vienna, Seattle, and Miami have now been added). However, by the end of this year, there will be hundreds of these cities online, says the team. Sounds like they are going to be busy!

Send Live Maps Collections to Your MSN Direct-Enabled GPS

sarahintampa — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 14:22:00 GMT

For users of MSN Direct-Enabled GPS devices, like those made by Garmin and Alpine Electronics Inc., sending directions from your PC to your car is possible with the latest release of the MSN Direct API. This new functionality has now been integrated into Live Maps, too. Many people still use a PC to find directions on the internet when they’re planning a trip, but would then have to re-enter those directions into their car’s GPS or make a printout to take with them. But now, using Windows Live Maps, you can find your route and save it as a Collection. Then, from the “Actions” menu, just choose “Send To GPS” to have the map sent to your GPS device in your vehicle.

High Tech Hiking in South America

Tina — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:27:00 GMT

Brian Keller and Mike Iem are avid hikers and just happen to be Microsoft employees. They are heading out on a three week hike to South America in a few weeks and stopped by the Channel 10 Studios to show off the latest gadgets they're taking with them.

SteriPEN
GeoSetter
SPOT
Live Maps
Solar chargers
Ultra-Mobile PC Canon point-and-shoot hacking

Ask Maps Are Now Virtual Earth

sarahintampa — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:21:00 GMT

Big news! Chris Pendleton is reporting that Ask.com has decided to forgo their mapping service in favor of the Virtual Earth platform. If you go to maps.ask.com now, you’ll see a Virtual Earth map. Chris notes that this choice is common among portal sites who realize that the upkeep involved in running a mapping service requires a lot of infrastructure, frequent imagery and photography acquisitions, data updates, etc. So, instead they’ll often turn to another service like Virtual Earth, for example.

But now, with Ask’s maps gone, Jordan from Marketing Pilgrim mentions that he’s going to miss the walking directions feature which the maps provided. Well, as it turns out, Chris had already shared some sample code for walking directions in VE – it looks like it’s just a matter of someone building an app to support this. (img via Chris Pendleton)

Photo Mosaic Made With VirtualEarth

sarahintampa — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:01:00 GMT

It seems that lately, a lot of people have been using Virtual Earth to do some pretty amazing things. First there was this amazing DeepZoom thing and just recently, I located the blog belonging to the folks behind that project. Here, an older entry shows off a photo mosaic made with VirtualEarth tiles. John O’Brien created this image of the Sydney Opera House from maps.live.com using a bunch of tiles from the road and aerial views of the Live Maps image using images found in his PC’s cache. Then, using a tool called AndreaMosaic (it works on 64-bit, too!), he created the mosaic you see at the left of this post. If you want to make your own mosaics, too, there’s a tutorial here on how to use the AndreaMosaic software.

The Microsoft 216 Megapixel Camera

Larry — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:41:00 GMT

Did you know that Microsoft makes a 216 Megapixel camera? I didn't know either until I read it on Mark Brown's Virtual Earth blog, but it turns out that this is the photobeastie behind the orthogonal imagery on Virtual Earth. The UltraCams are also used to create the 3D models you see on Virtual Earth through photogrammetric processing.

The UltraCam snaps an impressive 14,430 x 9,420 pixel image using 13 CCD's, sending them through 14 CPU's. The camera captures data at 3Gbits/sec, which led them to use two Infiniband cables rather than 14 firewire cables. Look for more info in a future episode of ShutterSpeed.

Get Addresses Using Aerial Photos in Live Maps

sarahintampa — Thu, 22 May 2008 13:19:00 GMT

Chris Pendleton recently wrote a mashup for Virtual Earth (Live Maps) that provides and address and a latitude/longitude whenever you click on any location on the map. After you install the app, click anywhere on the map and you'll get a pushpin. Hover over the pushpin and you'll get a pop-up that shows the nearest address to that point on the map as well as the lat/long of that location. He has now also added a link to the pop-up that will show you a Bird's Eye Photo of the location as sort of a picture-in-picture option. (see the picture to the left for an example). The app is available for download from his SkyDrive from here. If you want to help him improve the code, he has posted it to his site here.

Map the Chinese Earthquakes

sarahintampa — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:53:00 GMT

No doubt you've heard about the recent earthquakes in China. The Live Search Maps team in China has put together a collection rendering all of the earthquakes in China. In addition to mapping out where the earthquakes occurred, there's a sidebar which provides more information about each spot listed in the collection. This could be really useful for those tracking what's going on in the various affected regions. Too bad it's only in Chinese, though, I would love to have a translated version of this. (via Virtual Earth, an Evangelist's Blog)

40+ Terabytes of New Imagery for Virtual Earth

sarahintampa — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 13:35:00 GMT

Those Virtual Earth guys just never stop. The March release of VE has them pumping out 42.85 terabytes of imagery data! The release includes several new regions, but it's Ireland and the state of Mississippi that benefit the most, with the addition of Bird's Eye imagery for Cork and Limerick in Ireland and over 40 counties for Mississippi.You can see the full list here. But what I what to know about is the hint the VE guys make on their blog entry that there are "hidden surprises" for Virtual Earth that will be turned on in a few weeks.

Live Maps Update

sarahintampa — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 10:40:00 GMT

The Live Maps team just released an update last week, adding 21 new 3D cities and over one hundred new "bird's eye" cities for the Live Maps service. The list includes cities both in the United States and in Europe. Check out the blog post for the complete list and see if your city or hometown was included. If you're in a large metro area, though, there's a good chance that Live Maps already has imagery for your area.

Also included in the update was new aerial imagery. All maps for North America have been republished with the latest NavteQ street data, new JD Barnes aerial imagery has been added for Canada, and lots of new aerial imagery has been added for both India and China.

NJection's Live Search Speedtrap Map

Larry — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 21:29:00 GMT

NJection has a Live Search map mashup that shows you where some of the most popular speedtraps around the world are. Although editorially we are against what one might call "Jeff Sandquist driving", categorically we hope that each of you update this map with the most current information available so that we all may be fully informed drivers.

In the future, NJection plans on creating a version for uploading to mobile GPS devices and GPS enabled phones. I'd just be happy to have a version that works on top of the traffic congestion map on Live Search for Windows Mobile.