Bing Maps Preview 3D Cities Using App

Experience cities in 3D with the Bing Maps Preview app (now available from the Windows Store for Windows 8.1).

You can see the complete list of 3D cities via Bing. If you have the Bing Maps Preview app installed, you can click on any city image to go directly to the 3D city experience.

See the 3D Cities here.

Or watch the preview video:

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Bing Maps: Global Ortho Project Complete for United States

Here is the recent announcement from Bing Maps regarding the Global Ortho Project.

In 2010 the Bing Maps team began its most ambitious mapping endeavor ever with the start of its Global Ortho (GO) project. Today we are excited to announce the completion of the GO project in the United States!

With the Global Ortho project, the Bing Maps Imagery team set a new standard in aerial map imagery by collecting every square inch of the Continental United States and Western Europe at 30cm resolution (1 foot = 1 pixel) in just two years – something that had never before been accomplished. This project has given us imagery that is brilliant, accurate and fresh, and the completion of the U.S. is a huge achievement! Now, more than ever we have the ability to deliver a consistent quality experience to all our consumers and enterprise customers.

The effort to bring high resolution imagery to market began in 2006 when Microsoft entered the aerial photography business with the acquisition of Vexcel Imaging. Microsoft began evolving and improving the flagship UltraCam aerial camera, and over time, developed a special version of the camera that acquires a very wide swath of imagery at high resolution. With this new camera Microsoft conceived the Global Ortho project, designed to bring consistent quality and resolution to every part of the United States and beyond.

And that is what is so special about the Global Ortho program. There is higher resolution imagery of some certain areas available, but there is no continent-wide mosaic at this high of a resolution. What GO brings you is an amazing view into familiar places (like your own home) and remote corners of the United States.

The amount of imagery that Bing Maps acquired and processed for the Global Ortho project is staggering. The GO acquisition in US was completed in two years; contrast that with the second biggest aerial photography project, the USGS’s National Agriculture Imagery Program, or NAIP. Based on comparable specs it would take NAIP 42 years to acquire the same amount of imagery. That’s a HUGE amount of imagery. To get a sense of the size of the GO project, think about it in pixels. At 30cm per pixel if you lined up all the GO pixels end to end, they would reach:

- Around the earth 994 times

- To the moon 104 times

- To Venus, with an extra seven trillion pixels to spare

This video highlights the Bing Maps massive Global Ortho Program that is redefining aerial map imagery.

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Bing Maps Webcast

Bing Maps Webcast
Event Date: March 24, 2011
Event Time: 2:00pm – 3:00pm EST

Latest features in Bing Maps APIs: Silverlight, AJAX, REST

Attend this webcast and learn about the latest features in Bing Maps including AJAX and REST APIs.

Latest Bing Maps features include:

* AJAX 7 API
* REST API
* Synthview

We’ll discuss these new APIs and capabilities. We will look at code samples and how to get started. We will also look at the AJAX Map DataConnector allowing easy integration with SQL Spatial databases.

Click here to register!

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Bing Open Street Map of the World

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is the newest layer for Bing Maps and the newest Bing Map App in the gallery. The map app, dubbed simply, “OpenStreetMap” loads OSM maps as a new map style option. OpenStreetMap follows a similar concept as Wikipedia, but for maps and other geographic facts (despite its name, it's by no means only limited to streets and roads). People, like you and me, gather location data across the globe from a variety of sources such as recordings from GPS devices, from free satellite imagery or simply from knowing an area very well, for example because they live there. This information then gets uploaded to OpenStreetMap's central database from where it can be further modified, corrected and enriched by anyone who notices missing facts or errors about the area.

Users can still perform searches atop of the OSM map layer. Once the OSM Maps are rendered, users will find the OSM map option listed in the map types so if you switch to Bird’s Eye or some other native Bing map types, you can easily return to the OSM map style. Of note, we are using the Mapnik map style from OSM (one of the many map styles available to open source users) to create our OSM map type.

Check it out on Bing.com.

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Bing Maps Imagery - Updates and Expansion

Bing Maps imagery released the updates on new images and the expansion of the Enhanced Birds Eye outside the United States. The following is a list of the coverage.

Bird’s Eye

* Italy – 5,547 sq. km.
* Netherlands – 554 sq. km.
* Romania – 1,414 sq. km.
* Spain – 512 sq. km.
* Sweden – 1,174 sq. km.
* United States – 120,181 sq. km.

Aerial (Ortho)

* Australia - 54,488 sq. km.
* Botswana - 46,179 sq. km.
* Canada - 391 sq. km.
* Lesotho - 6,201 sq. km.
* Mexico - 584,527 sq. km.
* Morocco - 109,448 sq. km.
* Namibia - 47,199 sq. km.
* New Zealand - 57,540 sq. km.
* Portugal – The Whole Country!
* South Africa - 221,336 sq. km.

As always, check out all the new imagery highlighted on the Bing Maps World Tour.

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Bing maps updates with Twitter feed

Microsoft updates Bing Maps with Streetside eye-level views and a Twitter feed.

Microsoft on Dec. 2 released new features for Bing, its search engine, set to roll out over the next few days. Prominent among these new features is the beta version of the updated Bing Maps, featuring Streetside and Photosynth imagery. Although Streetside works very similarly to Google's Street View, in that it offers an eye-level perspective on local terrain, Microsoft took pains on the official Bing Blog to imply differences between the two applications.

Many of the adjustments to Bing Maps seem to echo a Microsoft mission to pair traditional online cartography with real-time information from the Web. Particularly in that spirit is Twitter Maps, which displays Tweets originating from particular geographic locations; for example, typing in "New York" will display the most recent Tweets originating from Bryant Park, a Madison Avenue bar and other locations, marked by a Twitter-branded pin on the Bing Map.

Other "Map Apps" include current traffic, live traffic video feeds from across the United States, local attractions and businesses, a hotel finder, Photosynth, and Signs & Billboards. A feature called Local Lens indexes local blogs from around the country, showing events happening within particular communities.

There is also a new Bing for Windows Mobile application with "improved auto-locate and voice search". The application allows users to speak a search query into their phones and provides streamlined access to maps and driving directions, quick bookmarking of local businesses and locations for later reference, and saved favorites and recent searches.

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Bing Maps 3D add-on

From report: Bing Maps, which was formerly known as Virtual Earth, is Microsoft’s answer to Google Maps. The maps service is directly available on the Bing homepage and offers a 2D mode by default. This mode can be used to zoom in and out of locations in the world or get directions from one place to another. The main difference between the two maps services is the third party support. Hundreds, if not thousands of Google Maps mashups exist which is one of the prime reasons for the popularity of the service.

Bing Maps 3D is an add-on for Bing Maps which activates the 3D mode. This mode adds the possibility to zoom and rotate in 3D. Probably the most interesting aspect of the add-on are the 3D models of buildings and sights that have been added to the map. Among the cities are New York, Las Vegas, Tokyo and Berlin.

Bing Maps 3D can be installed in two different ways. The first option is to visit the Bing Maps website and click on the 3D link in the upper left control panel. This will open a window with the possibility to download Bing Maps 3D. The second possibility is to download the add-on directly from a Microsoft server. The web browser needs to be closed and restarted after installation. The installation displays (preselected) options to switch to MSN as the homepage and Bing as the default search engine. Users who do not want this should ensure that they have unchecked the options.

A fast video card and Internet connection is advised to enjoy Bing Maps 3D.

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Quebec underwater structure found in Bing Maps?

I am just confused on what really this structure that I found while playfully browsing the updated Bing maps. I found what looks like an underwater structure near the Pont Pierre-Laporte bridge in Quebec, Canada.

Bing image of the location of the monstrous structure (encircled):
I tried to look for it using Google Earth but could not find it.
Can anyone shed a light on what this structure really is? Below is the zoomed image. What is that? That doesn't look like a shadow to me.

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Bing Maps: New Imagery and Map Data

Microsoft introduced the second major update to Bing Maps since the Cloud mapping, search and location service was rebranded at the end of May 2009. The latest refresh to what used to be Live Search Maps (Virtual Earth) brings to the table no less than 41 Terabytes of new imagery and map data. Chris Pendleton, the Virtual Earth technical evangelist for Microsoft, revealed that the update extended the coverage of Bing Maps by almost 190,000 square kilometers, over 10,000 of which are just Bird's Eye imagery.

“We just deployed 41TB of new satellite imagery, aerial photography and vector data for Bing Maps covering 189,000+ square kilometers of Earth including 12,000+ square kilometers of Bird’s Eye photography. Did we get your town this time? Check out the Bing Maps World Tour to sit back, relax and watch the Bing Maps Silverlight Control take you through every new local with new data. Alternatively, you can immerse yourself into the application and explore for yourself,” Pendleton said.
The previous update for Bing Maps was introduced in May 2009 and offered users no less than 248,000 sq. kilometers of new imagery. At that time, Microsoft did not indicate the size, in TB, of the refresh that was announced after Live Search Maps and Virtual Earth were rebranded to Bing Maps and Bing Maps for Enterprise.

June 2009 was also the month when the Redmond company introduced Bing Maps World Tour. Hosted on Microsoft's Cloud platform, Windows Azure, and powered by Silverlight, Bing Maps World Tour is designed to allow users to easily navigate just the newly added content, delivered through the latest updates of the service.

“Each month the Bing Maps platform releases significant imagery from around the globe. This month's tour showcases the latest release including new imagery for 164 locations in 38 countries such as Australia, Canada, Spain, Mexico, India, Korea, China and the United States,” reads the welcome message for Bing Maps World Tour. Users have the option to either watch a slideshow and get familiar with the new content or explore all the new imagery added with the July 2009 update by themselves.

Bing Maps users will also be able to “check out the newly updated vector data information for Japan. All new roads throughout the entire country,” Pendleton added.

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