Live Search Gets New 3-D Online Mapping Interface

The launch of Virtual Earth 3D makes Microsoft's new online mapping platform available to Live Search customers and developers, giving them a three-dimensional environment to search, browse and explore the real world online.

Virtual Earth 3D lets users navigate over cities and between buildings much like the way they can in virtual-reality environments, but it is different from many other offerings in the market as it is a downloadable browser application.

But that application only works with Microsoft's own Internet Explorer browser, although I'm told the team is working to make the experience available on other web browsers like Firefox and, eventually, Apple Macs.

Stephen Lawler, the general manager for Microsoft's Virtual Earth Group, told me that he believed this new platform was "setting a new precedent and it is really the beginning of the 3-D Web. We are at the forefront of bringing this new paradigm to customers and, over time, people will grow to expect this kind of experience for all their data," he said.

This new technology compiles photographic images of cities and terrain to generate textured, photorealistic 3-D models with engineering-level accuracy.

"In order to create a textured model of a building, each section of the building needs to be available in at least 40 different photos. When a plane is flying over a city, each picture needs to overlap the previous picture taken by 90 percent. In order to create a detailed textured model, we take photos from one direction, directly above the city," Lawler said.

While three-dimensional models will initially be available for 15 U.S. cities - San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Detroit, Phoenix, Houston, Baltimore, Atlanta, Denver, Dallas and Fort Worth - this will be expanded at a rate of eight new cities a month until next spring, when that is ratcheted up even further.