Richard Brundritt at Infusion Development has started a great new technical blog on using Virtual Earth. There are some great technical resources here, for example this post on using custom icons with the new Virtual Earth Imagery Web Service.
Archive for the 'Virtual Earth' Category
Recently I met Brian and Neil form Earthware and they have been telling me about some of the new stuff they are working on. They have been developing some really cool stuff with the VE API. One of these as an integration of street photos (taken from the back of a motorbike apparently!) into their NovaLoca application. These cover the London area.
More details are available on their blog. It is a great application for getting some more context on what is in a street etc.
I was speaking to Mark Brown at TechEd this morning. After he had berated me for blogging this photo, we spoke about the best technical resources for VE. A while ago I blogged on this here.
Now Mark has been working on dev.live.com/virtualearth/ as a one stop shop for technical links for VE developers. This is really great and contains all kinds helpful advice like how to sign up for a VE evaluation account.
Mark would appreciate any feedback on what else could be included on the page.
This week I am at TechEd EMEA 2008 Developers on the Virtual Earth “Ask the Expert Stand”. TechEd is a Microsoft event aimed at developers (and is not ashamed at being very technical!)
It has been great talking to loads of mainstream developers who are looking to include a mapping as part of their applications. It feels more and more that we have moved mapping out of the GIS ‘niche’ to something that is just one component of an application. At last!
Just released is version 6.2 of Virtual Earth Map Control and the new Virtual Earth Web Services. I will be blogging on the new features in detail over the coming weeks. There is some really exciting stuff.
Meanwhile heaps more information is on Chris Pendleton’s blog
One of the common problems with Web Mapping applications is that what end users regard as a place often does not match the ‘official’ place names in the commercial gazetteer data that web mapping services depend on for geocoding. For example in London everyone knows where “Soho“, “Bloomsbury” and “Big Ben” are, but in reality these are not official place names. These kind of unofficial place names are often referred to as “Vanity Areas”. End users rightly expect that there web mapping application will take them to these places, but if we rely on commercial gazetteer data alone this is not enough.
Sp how can we fix this? Well, Multimap have integrated GeoNames as an additional data source for address look-ups. You can see it in action not only on multimap.com, but also in the Multimap API.
From the Multimap blog:
GeoNames is a global geographical database that contains over 6.5 million places, with 2 million alternative names in up to 200 languages, that is continuously updated by users around the world, through a friendly wiki interface. Any changes are integrated into the Multimap databases within 24 hours.
GeoNames contains geographic places such as mountains, seas, lakes, valleys, coasts, and places of interest. In addition, it also contains alternative names so you can find a place like ‘London’ in many different languages (Londres, Londra, Londýn, Londain, Londinium).
A great example cropped up recently with a customer I work with. They had recently developed a new web mapping application and were demoing it to all their local sites. They knew that one local web master always tested mapping applications by searching for the small hamlet in which they lived in. This hamlet is so small it does not appear in any of the commercial gazetteers. So they added this hamlet to Geonames before doing the demo. When the web master saw the application and found their hamlet they said it was the best web mapping application they had seen!
It is also possible to integrate Geonames with Virtual Earth. Johannes Kebeck has done a blog post on this.
One of my favourite trips in Innsbruck is a trip on the Stubaitalbahn. This is a tram that winds it way out of Innsbruck and into the alpine Stubaital valley and is also a great way of getting into the mountains for some fantastic walking. It is quite intriguing how the tram winds its way around the mountainsides to make it up to the village of Fulpmes. So I thought it would be interesting to create a VE mashup to see the route on a map and most importantly in 3D.
Although it looks good in 2D:
It only really comes to life when you switch to the 3D view:
So how did I make this?
Well I used MapCruncher. MapCruncher is a great free Microsoft tool to take a map image, georectify it and then chop into automatically into tiles which match the Virtual Earth tile specification. It then generates a sample mashup application for you which you can easily modify to you needs.
Essentially I found a map of the line here and imported it into MapCruncher. I then had to match points that correspond on your map and the Virtual Earth mapping. I this case I set about 20 points along the track, at the edge of bends or stations:
Next I set the white areas of the map image as transparent. Then all I had to do is render the tiles using the renderer:
Simple!
For more help there are resources on the MapCruncher site and this video gives a good overview.
Now I only need to get some photosynths done of the trams and I’m a fully fledged tram-spotter….
Taiwan’s local search and map services “Live Pages” has just been launched:
In my mind this is still the big challenge for all web mapping: providing mapping, geocoding and routing that has been properly localised for local markets (rather than just providing a generalised Western centric view of the word). If we do everything in Latin characters the world might as well be flat…
Microsoft Surface is a new way of interacting with digital content via a tabletop display on which you use gestures and touch to interact.
This video shows how cool this can be with maps! After about 3 mins it shows Surface in action with Virtual Earth
I think this new kind of interactive environment is what mapping is crying out for. A screen and mouse has always been a rather inferior and crude way to interact with maps, especially when a group of people are looking together.
Finally something that comes close to being as good as a paper map!
Photosynth is my favourite technology at the moment and I am really excited to see that it is now live for all! See http://photosynth.net/Default.aspx
More info is here.
We’re pleased to announce the first full release of Photosynth, available now at photosynth.com. Photosynth takes a collection of regular photographs and reconstructs the scene or object in a 3-D environment. For those of you who have seen the videos or tried our tech preview, you could experience synths that we made in the lab and get a feel for what Photosynth is and how it works. But now, for the first time ever you can create synths from your own pictures and share them with your friends. Explore great synths from others or create a few of your own.
Seeing is believing - try making one! It is really easy.
Update
Chris Pendleton has just blogged a Virtual Earth and Photosynth mashup. See here. Go Chris!
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