Get inside the planes that capture Microsoft Virtual Earth

Microsoft's Mark Brown has put up a cool post on his Microsoft Virtual Earth blog. It's part two of a series that's detailing some of the bits and pieces behind the tool that gives you that oh-so-helpful bird's-eye view of your dry cleaners.

In this episode Brown sits down with Keystone Aerial Surveys, a Philadelphia-based company that's got less than 50 employees and 14 airplanes doing all the capture work.

Interesting bits:

• Keystone's flights average about 5 hours a trip.
• Each trip brings in about 1,000 super high-resolution images that come out to about 100 square miles.
• Certain map suppliers will only shoot during certain parts of the year--Microsoft takes photos year round.
• City images can be some of the toughest shots to get because of shadows.
• Companies like Keystone need to buddy up to air traffic controllers to get special clearance for "loitering" (going back and forth in the same general area).
• Pilots get their flight data from software that maps out areas that need to get captured. You can see a demo of this in action in the first third of the video.
• The "UltraCam" that takes the pictures uses a special infrared sensor that cuts through cloudy spots. You can see it snapping and cutting apart shots once they're up in the air.

The video is a about an hour long and definitely worth a watch if you like planes and maps. If you're feeling impatient you can skip ahead to the 32:10 mark to get to the good stuff--like when they're flying around to take pictures of your backyard.

Behind The Maps - Flying the UltraCam

Note: I didn't even realize until after posting that the video was in Silverlight and not Adobe Flash, so if you absolutely refuse to download and install it on your system there are alternate download links courtesy of XBOX Live's Major Nelson: iPod, Zune, PSP and WMV

[t8]

Who cares about Microsoft's Virtual Earth anyway?
Most people use Google Earth.

[yandoodan]

Virtual Earth flies airplanes around to take cool oblique photos of everywhere from every direction. Google Earth puts cameras on car roofs. What's /that/ about????

[Josh.Lowensohn]

I use it from time to time. Sure Google Earth and Google Maps are more popular, but I find Microsoft's imagery to be more compelling at the city level. They also had in-browser 3D maps well before Google did ;)

[thrillsnskills]

Uhhh, T8...

LOTS of people care about MVE!

I actually prefer it over Google Earth.
Before you knock it - you should try it.
It is actually REALLY good!

[jef5623]

But Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth have to do a lot better to enter into the 7th age of computing, right?

[S.E.Pummershein]

I love my home planet Earth! Forever, or more 5.000.000.000. years.