Know more about virtual earth
Live Search Maps
Live search maps is a free online web browsing service from Microsoft Corporation. It is freely available all over the world and covers most parts of the world. Previously it was named windows live maps and windows live local. However later the name was changed to live search maps. It is a part of windows live online application services suite. It is powered by the powerful Microsoft Virtual Earth framework.
It provides a lot of features which are very useful. Some of them have been discussed below.
Street Maps
This features provides maps of streets of major cities around the world. Some important places on these streets like metro stations, hospitals, stadiums, other facilities, etc also are displayed. Moreover users also can create their own points of interest, and live search maps includes these creations in its street maps data set. Therefore you can also see such points of interest in the street maps. In addition to all this you can also see public collections businesses or business locations and find people in the street maps.
Such detailed maps are available for all major cities in the world. The resolution is greatest in the city center however the outskirts as well have enough resolution. Apart form street maps of important cities live search maps also provides data about arterial roads and highways for other regions.
Satellite imagery
Live search maps provides features several terabytes of aerial and satellite imagery. It provides a maximum resolution of 4.5 pixels in most areas. This satellite imagery also features labels which provide information about places. If you do not need them and they are blocking the image you can toggle them off at anytime. Thus it is up to you whether you want to see the images as they would appear naturally, if you were flying above that place, or to see them in the form of a map.
Such satellite imagery is available for several countries. Some of them are given below.
United States, Canada, Germany, United Kingdom, Italy, New Zealand Australia, Japan, India.
Bird's eye view
Bird's eye views are the views of places as they would appear to a bird flying over it. These views are at a much higher resolution than the satellite imagery. With these views you can see even the details like people and their shadows. These images are available for most cities in the united states. They are also available for some location in Europe as well. Bird's eye view images are aerial photographs taken from four angles.
3D Maps
The 3D maps feature, as the would suggest provide you buildings in 3D. Not just that you get 3D images, but they also are completely interactive. You can rotate, tilt, pan and zoom in or out of them. Near-photorealism is achieved by texturing buildings by making the use of composites of aerial photography.
For viewing this 3D imagery you just need to install a Plugin, and then you can enable 3D option from Virtual Earth. This 3D imagery can be controlled with the mouse and keyboard quiet easily. Moreover you can also use a Xbox 360 controller or any other game controller which would work with Windows Vista or Windows XP format. Since April 2007 it can be navigated with the help of 3Dconnexion's input device 'SpaceNavigator'.
Technorati Tags: MSN, Live Search Maps, Wikipedia
Tags: Microsoft Virtual Earth
