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May 27, 2005
MSFT's Virtual Earth movie
You must watch this Virtual Earth video. It’s casual a half-hour demo with the Microsoft Virtual Earth team (four guys!?) in their office. This thing looks stunning. It looks to be a major improvment over Google Maps in almost every way. For one thing, the map is almost the entire UI, with searching and filtering widgets unobtrusively layered on top. The full-width map makes it look a lot more like a desktop app. And there are a couple of amazing additional features, like the ability to layer graphical map information on top of the satellite views.
And of course the “eagle-eye view” looks fantastic, although the draggable magnifying glass lens UI is pretty cheesy, and needlessly limits the viewing port of what’s otherwise a remarkable image. I hope that doesn’t make it into the final product.
Posted by Andrew at May 27, 2005 04:09 PM