Virtual Earth Features 2
The geographical coverage of Virtual Earth varies according to the feature. Moreover, specifications of each feature vary in the covered region as well.
Directions for walking
If you want to go to some place, walking Virtual Earth can help you. It will provide you the shortest route and therefore you would not need to walk much and reach the place earlier.
Driving and walking directions and data in the local languages
Virtual Earth can provide you this data in as many as 15 languages. Therefore, you can get it in the language you want.
Multipoint routing
This feature helps you to optimize you travel schedule and therefore you can improve you driver efficiency.
Traffic reports
If you choose a wrong route, you may be land up in a traffic jam. This may waste a lot of precious time. However using Virtual Earth, you can avoid all this. Before setting out for the journey you can look over the traffic on the routes. Therefore, you can keep yourself away from traffic.
GeoRSS Feeds
With this feature, you can download or import different pushpins, shapes, and polylines. All these are very useful and add to the usability of Virtual Earth.
Support for a Cross-Browser
Virtual Earth also supports Apple Safari 2 and 3. Therefore, if your computer has these browsers even then you can enjoy Virtual Earth.
MapCruncher Beta
With this feature, you can easily overlay maps in an application.
Geographic coverage
Maps are provided by Virtual Earth for almost all the regions of world. However, the details of these maps, as well as some of the other features as well differ from region to region. The coverage for the different features is given below.
Coverage for street, routing and directions:
The road coverage is available for most of the countries. Note that the road tiles are obtained from the same source of data as the maps from MapPoint Website Service. At this moment the tile are provided by Virtual Earth only in English language, even though the data is the same as for the MapPoint service.
The Map Control also uses the MapPoint Web Service for providing routes in Australia-Pacific, and the other regions, which lie outside the nine main areas of coverage. While on the other hand, it uses Metropolis for the North America and Europe.
Coverage for the features as Birds eye view, 3D view, Aerial and Satellite Imagery
The 3D terrain data is available in most of the countries. Virtual Earth has such data like textured building models, for a number of major cities in the world.
The bird’s eye view is available in almost 30% of the population of US. It is available for some parts of UK as well.
Orthographic aerial and satellite images are available for the whole earth, through the Virtual Earth Map Control. However, the details vary according from country to country. It is most detailed in UK and US (note: here as well it is not the same for the whole country). Also, note that Virtual Earth is constantly expanding its coverage areas. Therefore, even if your area does not have the coverage at this moment it is advisable that it is regularly checked.
Technorati Tags: Virtual Earth, Product Details, Features and Functionality, Geographic coverage
Tags: Microsoft Virtual Earth
