Microsoft's 3D cityscapes go live with New York

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 29 May 2007 11:59

Your IT - Home IT

Microsoft has launched Microsoft Live Search Maps offering three-dimensional, photo-realistic views of New York City buildings and landscapes, with other cities around the world to follow shortly.

Microsoft promises that the free online service will provide "a unique look at many of New York's iconic locations, along with local listings, ratings and reviews and driving directions to help people easily find, discover, plan and share relevant location information." This puts it head to head with Google Maps, but with the 3D mapping which Google is still working on.

The Live Search Maps 3-D New York cityscape will initially provide aerial views of Times Square, Central Park, Wall Street, Rockefeller Plaza and "dozens of other famous spots" along with Yellow Pages listings, location and contact information, consumer ratings and reviews for New York City businesses; Real-time traffic incident and driving directions incorporated into maps. Users will be able to create custom maps and lists of places for their own use or to share with others

Austin, Texas, Cape Coral (Florida), Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Northampton (UK), Ottawa, Savannah (Georgia) and Tampa (Florida) will be added over coming weeks. The service is at http://maps.live.com/, but when iTWire tried to access it reverted to a different link.

iTWire flagged the possibility of this service last November when Microsoft enhanced Live Search with a new service, Virtual Earth, giving searchers the option to display search results as two-dimensional views or three dimensional models.  This followed Microsoft demonstrating the Photosynth technology at the SISGGRAPH 2006 conference in Boston  and Microsoft being reported to be commissioning an army of photographers to take "millions of pictures of urban landscapes from planes, vans and motorbikes" to create 3D images on Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D. /

Google is also getting into the same game. Last September it announced a multimedia overlay for Google Maps providing information about the location that the user zooms in on.