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Last updated: Thursday, December 3, 2009

Microsoft has unleashed a new Silverlight version of Bing Maps featuring a new immersive viewing mode and a third-party application gallery. Like Google Maps, Microsoft’s search-driven offering now includes street-side and aerial views that enable users to explore what’s around them, noted Bing Maps Technical Evangelist Chris Pendleton “Our investments in photogrammetric processing are being leveraged for a new mode in the urban areas where we’ve captured high-resolution photography and stereo data to create models of the respective cities,” Pendleton wrote Wednesday in a blog. “These models are now a part of an enhanced bird’s-eye urban view — which places our 3-D models into a 2-D interface with 3-D aspect ratio from Silverlight 3.” An Immersive Technology Microsoft and Google “have been going back and forth for some time now” with respect to who is ahead in the race for online geolocation search supremacy, noted Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions On Microsoft. “The latest features from Microsoft are a continuation of that arms race,” Rosoff said. The good news for consumers is that the rivalry is quickly moving the technology beyond what one would expect from something that used to be just about directions and driving. “When we extend mapping all the way down to the street level, that’s when the map really becomes one-to-one with real life,” said Bing Maps Architect Blaise Aguera y Arcas. To help bring this about, Bing Maps is harnessing the power of an online app called Photosynth that stitches photos together and converts them into a three-dimensional model called a synth. Among other things, Photosynth enables users to zoom in, out and around any location as well as examine the surrounding area by rotating the point of view by a full 360 degrees. Though similar technologies have been around for a long time now, Google Maps does…

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Bing Maps Gets Google-Like Aerial and Street-Side Views

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