Comments on: Google gathers 3D data with Street View

The search colossus has confirmed that it's using laser scanners to gather 3D data as it photographs cities for its Street View.

[krosavcheg]

I hope they release a 'Google Earth' virtual reality game like secondlife :)

[Mapper99]

That's exactly what they are up to (with advertising of course)!

M
http://streetviewgallery.corank.com

[earthware]

Interesting you choose to show a virtual earth screenshot when 90% of the article is about Google Earth, was Google Earth just not interesting enough?

Brian Norman
http://www.earthware.co.uk

[MarkJBrown]

Hi Stephen. My name is Mark Brown. I am a Senior Product Manager for Virtual Earth at Microsoft.

I enjoyed your article and it will be interesting to watch Google progress through its experiment to create 3D models using lasers. I had just a few comments on Virtual Earth for you and your readers.

Currently Virtual Earth has over 250 complete cities that you can fly through today created using a fully automated photogrammatic process that allows users to explore locations from all vantage points, not just cruising above them.

Las Vegas, which you show in your article, along with Phoenix, Denver and Dallas are the first of four new 2.0 version cities that is using an even more advanced photgrammetric process. That, combined with the advanced digitial aerial camera that Microsoft manufactures, UltraCam, provides even more precise and realistic models of buildings and even models the vegetation such as trees. Users can see this when flying down at street level in any cities using our 3D 2.0 version.

And since this process is completely automated we will be bringing many many more cities online using this new process in the near future.

All of this is available completely online today at http://virtualearth.com or http://maps.live.com. The only necessary download being a 5MB managed plug-in (not Active-X). Support for IE and FF on Windows only.

People can also get tons more information about our 3D efforts around Virtual Earth at http://dev.live.com/virtualearth or check out my blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/markbrown

Thanks again Stephen.
-Mark

[aristotle_dude]

Mark, when is your company going to embrace open standards and stop using that activex garbage? Your company has demonstrated that they can port silverlight to other OSes and you are trying to push virtual earth as a competitor to Google Earth, so why not use silverlight for that product allowing use of virtual earth on OS X and linux?

[jmdunys]

Mark,

As long as 'Windows only' is a feature of your products, you will be seen as the evil empire by many.

For goodness sake, is there anyone sane at Microsoft to talk about REAL separation between Windows and the rest of the Microsoft products (especially on-line) or are you just being used to keep an everlasting hook into something that is becoming less and less relevant?