The new Bing Maps is crazy cool!
Who says Microsoft doesn’t innovate anymore?!?
The Bing Maps team has just released a major update built entirely on Silverlight 3. Some of the new enhancements are simply crazy cool! First up is something called Streetside. With Silverlight 3 they’re able to take advantage of some 3D aspects for this Streetside concept and really immerse the users into the site. One of the first things I tried out was to bring up Chicago and literally walk throughout the city with my little blue avatar. The imagery and the navigation is simply amazing. It was very simple to walk down the street and navigate myself around different streets and corners. In the upper right-hand corner, the map shows me the direction I’m viewing and my field-of-view.
If I move my blue avatar further down the street, the technology is able to detect a geographic change in the street, in this case Wacker Drive rounding a corner, and changes my avatar to let the user know there is a directional change. Think of what’s going on here. This is Silverlight, folks! Very cool!
Some of the other enhancements include an Enhanced Bird’s Eye view that incorporates our 3D model views and hi-res bird’s eye images for both urban and rural areas. In cases where we don’t have bird’s eye photography, we use various satellite data to represent 2D data as a 3D model, such as a mountain, thanks to Silverlight.
Also, one of the coolest things is the integration of Photosynth into Bing Maps.
This means you can zip down from space down into someone’s house…not kidding. If you’ve built a synth on Photosynth.com and geo-annotated it (the little globe icon) your synth gets indexed into Bing Maps.
There are way too many new and amazing features to list here. Get the run down from the Bing Maps announcement and check out the Channel9 video where Chris Pendleton walks through the various enhancements.
