On Jeff Henshaw's Hog Blog, show's an interesting Virtual Earth mashup to explore some of the best riding spots in the US.

This time indoors. I put Virtual Earth and Photosynth together as an example of outdoor to indoor exploration.

 
Video: Virtual Earth and Photosynth - Zoom Indoors

This is an example of linking Microsoft's Virtual Earth and Photosynth technologies to create a totally immersive world exploration experience. Note that Photosynth is not yet available, except as a technology preview, but as Robert Scoble pointed out, it certainly has a "wow" factor! Check it out when you have a chance and suggest ways you could use it.

Among the top contenders I've heard from both consumers and business people:

• Travel - see the St. Peter's example below
• Law Enforcement - reconstruct a crime scene
• Military/NGOs - response to natural disasters (e.g. including timeline photo comparisons)

 
Video: Virtual Earth and Photsynth Tour of St. Peter's Basilica

Video of Virtual Earth 3D in San Francisco - another example of custom programming on top of Virtual Earth like the previous "Flight Simulator" simulator post. This one sends Ghosts into the atmosphere and was used by a Microsoft developer to explore using 3D actors in the managed control - more info on how to program the Virtual Earth managed control can be found on Heptazane's stump.

Here is a map of where the video takes place - the pushpins show the start (bottom-right) and end (top left) locations. (Click on the map to launch Virtual Earth centered on San Francisco.)

I've been a huge fan of MS Flight Simulator since the original vector version back in the 80's. Back then I imagined a fully immersive 3D world indistinguishable from the real world. We still have a ways to go, but look how far we've come...I found these at the Flight Simulator Vault...

Miegs Airport, Chicago, 1982 - this was my first view

Miegs Airport, Chicago, Flight Simulator 3 with "clouds"

Flight Simulator X, current state of the art (images from Microsoft)

While the sim looks extremely realistic, it's not. Some of the major skyline buildings have been modeled to provide a sense of being there, and there is an elevation model that shows things like mountains and "grand" canyons. But it's called a "simulator" for a reason.

On the other hand, Microsoft is also building a very realistic and accurate digital representation of the earth called Virtual Earth that doesn't have as many buildings, but has 15cm accuracy for the ones it does have. This gives a hyper-realistic feel to the cities...so I wondered what it would be like to replace the current "mapping" interface with a flight ladder and joystick and zoom over San Francisco at mach 2!

 
Video: Virtual Earth 3D Flight Interface

This example is a preview of the incredible power in the Virtual Earth managed control, which is installed when you select the 3D option and is currently in beta. The managed control is the code that runs in the browser and renders Virtual Earth in 3 dimensions (i.e. like modern computer games that allow you to interact with the world and walk/fly/drive through it.) Once it is released, you can expect a full API and documentation for developers to create their own fully immersive digital earth applications.

What's the first thing you did when you tested Google Maps, Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth?

If you're like me, you went to your house, like Chris Reeder did. But depending on where you live, you have a better experience in one application or another. For example, this is my house in Google Maps at maximum zoom: 

And here it is in Microsoft Virtual Earth using Bird's Eye view looking North, South (and you can also view East/West):

Chris wants better imagery of his house, and he will have it, someday. But it's going to take some time before all the vendors are able to cover the entire earth with recent imagery. I'm lucky that Microsoft has my area.

Google has lots of satellite imagery (i.e "top down") through their exclusive deal with DigitalGlobe, and Microsoft has many cities around the world in 45 degree aerial imagery (like those above) via their exclusive deal with Pictometry, as well as super high resolution images from their new line of UltraCam (a whopping 200+ megapixel!) cameras they got when they purchased Vexcel Corporation in 2006, and they are releasing new imagery every month!

And we haven't even started to talk about maps or 3D buildings, which are beginning to show up in both Google Earth and Virtual Earth, and  are beginning to set the stage for a fully immersive "digital earth" that will blend activities between the real world and the virtual world. Remember the Matrix?

Either way, the value of these systems go well beyond our ability to see our houses from above. With simple and powerful development kits,  these systems are ushering in a whole new category of integrated applications using geographic location as a reference baseline. For example, the Virtual Earth Interactive SDK shown here gives a developer a visual method to choose what they want to do with a map (red box on the left) and then either see the result on the map, view the source JavaScript (to cut/paste into their own application) or review reference material for more granular detail.

It's a great time to be in the digital earth space! What would you do with it, if you could have your way? 

I only did this to see if there was actually a difference in performance and quality, according to Nathan's post in response to Frank's comment.

I thought Nathan was objective, and I concur with much of his analysis. The Google Earth buildings look really colorful and the lighting facing east is better than Virtual Earth. Microsoft will need to work on the lighting and shadows issue - to be fair, here is the same picture Nathan used, but facing west - as you can see, it is significantly better.

Microsoft Virtual Earth 

It all depends on where the shadows are cast. Microsoft shows the image with the sun rising, and Google (below) shows the image with the sun setting.

Google Earth

Frank was right on as well when he said that Microsoft is investing a lot of money to create the most realistic digital earth available. I could be wrong on the number of buildings in Denver, but I estimated around 300 textured buildings for Google Earth, compared with 6,657 in Virtual Earth (confirmed with the Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D team.) I'm open to changing it to a more exact number if Google would like to supply it.

I had to zoom way out to capture many of the Virtual Earth buildings. The previous images were taken in the red box below. Note that it was only one small part of the greater Denver area, which spans several hundred square kilometers. Virtual Earth textured buildings cover the whole image below.

There are currently 30 cities of this quality in Virtual Earth today, and more are being added every month (e.g. Miami in time for the Super Bowl). I can't wait to see New York, and Chicago, and London, and Paris, and Berlin, and Tokyo, and Sydney...

Yes, I live in the greater Washington, DC area, and I thought it would be nice to map the Marine Corps Marathon. After mapping it, I switched to 3D mode in Virtual Earth to "fly" the course from a helicopter perspective, which you can view below. I have to say, running the marathon this way is WAY easier - I didn't even break a sweat.

 
Video: Virtual Earth 3D Marine Marathon

Just playing around with MapCruncher again today and draped an image of the moon from ASU's Space Exploration Resouces on top of Virtual Earth.

Here's what it looks like and you can run your own version here (note that IE 6/7 is currently required for 3D).

 
Video: Virtual Moon

*Tip - by some quirk in the web page, sometimes when you select the 3D option, you'll see the globe at a large distance. Zoom in a couple of levels before switching to 3D, or if you're already stuck, simply hit the Page Down key a couple of times to zoom.

Since I draped the image over the current version of Virtual Earth, an artifact you will notice is how much faster the VE earth tiles load before the Moon tiles from the S3 services. The nice thing about 3D is that the images stream together, so you don't see the underlying tiles before the new ones are blended in.

Using MapCruncher was easy. Posting the 5000 files to Amazon's S3 service and resetting the ACL's was the most difficult part. I used John Spurlock's NS3 Manager, but it hangs frequently when trying to set a large volume of ACL entries. I haven't seen a lot of tools for S3, and the last update from John's page was in May 2006.

The nice thing about S3 is its price - you can store and serve up gigabytes of data for pennies a month. Nice system, but they cater mostly to developers, who are putting interesting applications together, some of which you can see in their solutions catalog.

I was perusing Miami in Google Earth today, and came across the following 3D model of Dolphin Stadium. It looked a bit odd to me, so I fired up Virtual Earth to compare...

This is from Google Earth:

And in Virtual Earth:

The colors are much richer in Google Earth because it is a hand-drawn model from the 3D Warehouse. The Virtual Earth version looks more realistic, in my opinion, because it is created using a photogrammetric process from aerial photos (not to mention that it has a football field in the center!)

The city of Miami also looks very different. The following is from Google Earth:

And this one from Virtual Earth:

It's game day folks - what's the score?