Virtual Earth

local.live.com has been our friend since we moved to the US, the birds eye view is great for figuring out where things are when you're in a new and strange place and the ability to save collections has been useful for building our own geographical list of important places (like the post office, shops, places people have recommended to eat etc.). The coverage for Birds Eye is better in the US than elsewhere, but I met the person whos company is behind the aerial photography in Europe at a school sports day in the UK, and other places are gradually coming on stream.

This week, local.live has added support for 3D views and, as a fan of Google Earth, I had to check it out.

 

Above is the space needle in Seattle from a recent trip we made while below is something similar from local.live.com

seattleMSVirtualEarth Hosted on Zooomr

 

I tried getting views from Gas Works and Rainier, but you can't tilt the viewpoint upwards enough from ground level to get close to a match, while Snoqualmie Falls just doesn't have the imagery (yet?).

It's not as feature rich as Google Earth, but the imagery is great and it's nice to be able to flick back and forth with regular mapping in the same application. Two downers: you'll need to be running Internet Explorer, so no Firefox; and the CTRL-Mouse controls feel wrong headed for my simple hand-eye coordination.

Tags: mapping | live.local | googleearth | virtualearth