Microsoft is unveiling its integration of detailed 3D imagery into its Virtual Earth this afternoon (see Live.com). US users with Vista-ready Windows computers and IE 6 or 7 will be able to navigate through an aerial view of 15 select cities with enough detail to discern the texture of buildings and read clickable billboards from the likes of Fox, Nissan and John L. Scott Real Estate. Virtual Earth 3D is expected to expand to cover up to 100 cities around the world by the end of next summer.
Unlike Google Earth, Microsoft’s Virtual Earth is experienced directly inside of IE as part of search results. Search team member Bobby Figueroa told me that the 3D functionality would be useful to many business customers as an integrated feature in offerings like Zillow’s real estate search. The imagery was taken from planes and processed with proprietary algorithms.
He also told me that advertising was being integrated into Virtual Earth for the sake of realism. In real life, soda machines don’t appear with black or white labels – they say Coke or Pepsi on them, he told me. To insufficiently brand Virtual Earth would apparently be irresponsible in some way, perhaps as an artistic or cultural loss. Figueroa said that billboards would have to prove compelling to users or they would not zoom in close enough to view them in detail and click through. Figueroa would not discuss the particular relationship with the first wave of advertisers but said that the company would evaluate all methods of ad sales and tracking in order to determine what worked best.
I certainly have no inherent objection to advertising, but I’m not excited about it being the first thing I see when I gain the ability to see a new environment in 3D. It seems like a cynical priority when a dazzling new technology is first rolled out. I don’t know what I expected though, so I’ll wish Vista-ready Windows owners who use IE the best of luck in enjoying the use of a newly 3D virtual world.
You’ve also got to wonder if anything will ever come of the really impressive Street-Side preview, which we wrote about in February. See also the 3D photo fly through app in the works in Live Labs, called Photosynth.
In addition to integration of Virtual Earth with search and some browsers, another thing you have to give Microsoft credit for is seriously improved picture quality. See the following two shots of San Francisco, Virtual Earth 3D on the left and Google Earth on the right. Lastly a very nice looking shot found on the Virtual Earth blog. Google’s got some catching up to in regards to image detail. I’m going to try to grab an image of a billboard when I can.
Sniff, it doesn’t install for me
An error occurred downloading the following resource:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=72621
Date: 11/6/2006 2:36:32 PM
Get ready for a new dimension in search: “The page isn’t redirecting properly”
Congrats to the Virtual Earth team for delivering this feature right inside a browser!
“I certainly have no inherent objection to advertising, but I’m not excited about it being the first thing I see when I gain the ability to see a new environment in 3D”
Thats funny, thats exactly the response of most video game players to excessive in game advertising in VW enviornments…
Wow! This rocks. I don’t mind ads myself. They are part of the culture
The billboards are currently kind of cute. I think that sort of advertising will be a serious game eventually – having that kind of geo-precision will be very useful.
It’s interesting, but I’d vastly prefer a desktop client AS WELL.
Marshall, I think I saw a billboard atop TransAmerica building.
Eyecandy uselessness exemplified to the max !
Brought to you by MSFT
This is stunning. Beautiful work.
Marshall, I grabbed a couple of nice screen grabs of the billboards on my site. They are plastered all over the Seattle map.
whoaa..great details.yep,agree with u amit,now advertising is a part of our life~:P click for http://www.futureofrealestatemarketing.com/…nice shots fren
Tried to install a few times, and wont work. It keeps install and uninstall. Only works on IE.
The higher quality image is Boston if anyone was wondering.
Microsoft really did a nice job with this tool. http://ze-blogger.blogspot.com/2006/11/microsoft-virtual-earth-real-3d-real.html
It’s pretty hard on the browser, it crashed IE7 a couple times in a row for me. Now Google needs to finish their ActiveX (and make it embeddable):
http://members.home.nl/cybarber/geomatters/GoogleEarthGUIwithHtmlTimeScript.html
If only the damn thing would load.
This really rocks!
Good stuff. We’ll see how it looks in Eppraisal.com.
The 3d imagery within zillow is so great, I can’t wait to see how much better this new version is. I live in the middle of nowhere, and they still had 3 aerial shots of my house with amazing detail … you could even see me in the backyard mowing!
This is a nice step up on Google’s version. It’s rather unfortunate that there seems to be so many people having difficulties. The install went smooth and painless for me.
Grrrr. Not available outside US seemingly. Not even to install – I’m not expecting worldwide 3D yet but it would be nice to look around.
The 3D imagery and the detailed graphics truely rock. It will be interesting too see how Google reacts to this
I found a few billboards and saved them to a collection so that you can see for yourself. Much better than a screenshot. I’ve never used the live.com maps before; are the shareable collections a new feature or an old one? http://maps.live.com/?v=2&cid=1AC6D022238E8D01!133
My impression is that it works very well, although after a few hours of sitting in the background iexplore.exe is using over 500MB of memory.
The loading is painfully slow on my 4M DSL link and the the rendering
is killing my machine. To run, you really need:
1) 1G+ memory to make it reasonably usable
2) 1.5GHz CPU
3) High speed connection (a city downloads about 100M data)
Much of the photo work is being grabbed from an upstate ny company called Pictometry. http://www.pictometry.com/articles/wsj.asp
What will Microsoft think of next? Buying YouTube?
It looks really cool. Unfortunately, google still gets the last laughs because they wowed the consumer with Google Earth and this one looks like a better version of that.
Also, whats the value for the consumer? Is this going to be used by regular consumers or is it more for real estate, architects, geologists, etc? ok, I see that someone can see their house visually with this but what else – maybe integration with Zillow?
On live.com it advertises “beautiful city views” – and then I am redirected to a search box. Then nothing. What’s next ? Nothing .. what’s up ? Am I clueless ?
Cool. I can see value for the real estate industry.
Yes, very cool, but IE only = completely unacceptable.
Talking about the billboard ads, I wonder if the language used will be localized to the region shown or to the user’s preference. For example, since I’m fluent in Spanish and English, I would like to see the ads in either of these languages even while browsing through Asia.