Jamie's space: Live Maps

Live Maps: Extra

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 18:52:38 GMT

After playing with the new Live Maps for a few days I've found a rather nice new feature regarding Birds Eye. When you switch from 2D viewing to Birds Eye there is a momentary pause during which a small rectangle zooms in on the area that will be shown by the Birds Eye photo. Check it out in this following 14 second video where I use Birds Eye view to take a look at Lords, the home of Cricket.

Pretty cool eh? Its small things like this that can sometimes make all the difference.

I'm also pretty impressed with the GeoRSS features where you can subscribe to an RSS feed of geo-tagged content in an area defined by what is displayed on Live Maps at the current time. Here is one such RSS feed:

http://maps.live.com/GeoCommunity.asjx?action=retrieverss&mkt=en-us&ss=&bbox=-0.1910871614377681,51.5183947514826,-0.14293614520241687,51.53817859555869&startindex=0&order=date

I've highlighted the part of the URL that defines the rectangular area for which the feed should include content. What I think would be really cool would be, instead of defining a rectangle, I get to define a polygon for which content should be returned. That way I could draw a polygon defining my home town (Sunbury-on-Thames) like so:

and only see content for Sunbury-on-Thames. That would be very cool and hence led me to submit the following to Live Maps feedback:

The GeoRSS feature recently released allows me to define a rectangle for which to return content. Pretty useful stuff.
What I'd prefer is the ability to draw a polygon using the existing 'Mark an area on the map feature' and return content that appears in that polygon. Thus, I could subscribe to a feed that only returns content for my home town.

[Also added to my feedback lista.]

What else? Oh yeah, whilst drawing the shape that you see on the screenshot immediately above I noticed that you can now return to a previously created polygon and either move the points that define it, delete them, or create new ones. Check it out:

I'm not sure if that came with this release but I've never noticed it before so am going to assume that it did! Pretty cool anyway and very useful!

Have you spotted anything else that hasn't been reported as yet?

-Jamie

Windows Live Tags: clubhouse, story, live maps, birds eye, live search

Live Maps update is here

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:05:22 GMT

OK, ignore my last entry, the real info is herein.

1. New search bar

Finally Live Maps now has a single search box for whatever you want to find and it is much simpler than the last one. Scoble will be so happy.

2. Favourite collections

You can now save your favourite public collections for easy retrieval later. Great to see this being moved into Live Maps proper.

3. More 3D Tour Options

We now have new options for 3D tours including something I asked for, the ability to display photos from my collection when recording a 3D tour. Good news.

4. The 'Share' options dialog box has changed appearance

5. Birds Eye indicator

Whenever you happen to be browsing an area that has Birds Eye imagery you now get a more visual indication about it

6. Mapcruncher maps can now be added to a collection and thus added to a 3D tour

7. Collections can now be exported as KML, GPX or GeoRSS feeds

8. Send collections to a GPS device

This is for all those people that have signed up with MSN Direct.

9. New version of the Virtual Earth 3D control

and Liverpool appears on the installer

That's all that I could find for now. Its a very quick and dirty list and I'm sure there'll be something more complete on the VE blog very soon

-Jamie

Windows Live Tags: clubhouse, story, live maps, bird's eye, live search, collections, 3d

Live Maps in flux

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:50:54 GMT

As reported elsewhere, Live Maps is due to get an update today. I guess I caught them in the middle of the migration because upon visiting the site I was faced with this:

Strange stuff indeed. Still, it gives me an idea of what might be coming. It looks as though mapcruncher will exist for real on Live Maps and the buttons labelled "GPS" are very intriguing indeed - I suspect that will have something to do with the recent MSN Direct/GPS announcement. Well, I'm off to bed now, I'm sure the morning will bring enlightenment.

-Jamie

Windows Live service bites the dust

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 15:32:52 GMT

http://collections.live.com is no more

Did anyone use it anyway? I added a couple of things up there but I never found any use from it.

More Live Maps ideas

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 03:46:05 GMT

I've been churning out a few ideas for Windows Live lately and here are a couple more. This time concerned with Live Maps.

Collections currently require an internet connection in order to be viewed. I think there’s great potential for taking collections offline (i.e. as a stand-alone file) that you can interact with just as much as you can regular Live Maps.

This would be great for mobile devices because it would save bandwidth and thus save costs. Obviously the file contents would be a tiny subset of all the data available on Live Maps, but if you know what data you are going to need before you leave your house taking that subset with you would be a good thing.

The recent release of Live Maps (and the Virtual Earth platform) introduced the ability to build 3D tours of your collections (see some of them here). Its a fantastic feature but like anything there is still room for improvement. I noticed today that if you place a line such as this one:

on a collection and then build a 3D tour from that collection this is all you get:

Its hardly enthralling is it? All it does is zero in on the centre of the line. Instead I'd like something a bit like the video below that I had to record by placing lots of pushpins along that line that you see in the image at the top of this blog entry.

Still though its far from perfect. Its not the nice smooth journey along the route that one would like.
[I also acknowledge after writing this that I should have used something less bleak than the english Lake District for demo purposes but I'm not going back to redo it now. Hopefully you get the point.]

I have submitted both of these ideas to http://feedback.live.com and hence you can see them on my Feedback Lista as well. If you think it would e good to have these features then go and ask for them yourself as well.

-Jamie

Live Map collection stats

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 00:08:02 GMT

Recently Steve Lombardi from the Virtual Earth team published a blog entry in which he said "In reviewing activity reports for Live Search Maps today I noticed that <some collection> was viewed about a half million times today"

That interested me. The Live maps team are obviously able to track how many times each collection is viewed. That makes me ask why that information isn't available to the people that would really care - those that create the collection. For example, I've been working out in the USA for about a year now along with a number of colleagues and I put together a Live Map Collection showing some of the places we've visited. I sent a link around to other people in our company and I'd love to know how many of them actually looked at it.

I submitted the following to http://feedback.live.com: "Please tell us how many people have viewed our map collections and, if possible, who." I also added it to my Feedback Lista.

-Jamie

Live Maps 2.0 - Wow!

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 03:43:22 GMT

In January of this year Steve Lombardi from the Virtual Earth team asked what would we like to see appearing in Virtual Earth/Live maps? Here were a couple of my suggestions:

Integrate with PhotoSynth. I look forward to the day when I can zoom into a building or town square and then seamlessly shift into a PhotoSynth representation of it.
Record my movements and let me play them back later
in order to build the "video" just let me draw a line on a 2D map and then VE can convert this into a 3D video "route" for me

Well today's Live Maps release included nods to all of those and plenty more besides. Top of the list of new features for me are the ability to record a video of a 3D journey through points in a collection and Birds Eye layering on 3D maps. Let's take those in turn.

A picture is worth a thousand words so they say so what price a video? Here's a video I recorded today that shows all home stadium of each team in the English Premier League. Check it out:

I'm utterly blown away by this feature and have loads of ideas about how I am going to use this in the future. Here's one idea - I'm currently in the midst of creating a Live Events page for my wedding next year and I'll be embedding a video recorded from Live Maps that shows my guests how to get to the venue from the local airport.

The Birds Eye imagery within 3D maps is equally as impressive and here's a video of that being used to look at the place I'm currently working in downtown Houston, Texas.

See the manner in which available images are displayed? Seen that anywhere before?

For a longer (but not complete) list of all the improvements read the official announcement blog entry.

Me being me I've always got something to complain about so after playing with the new features for a couple of hours here's a list of changes I'd like to see happen:

I'd like to see us given the ability to directly upload the 3D tour video to MSN Video
Collection markers don't show up in the video. I'd like to have the option to have them included
Similarly in each collection that forms the basis of each video there is a lot more information than currently appears in the video (e.g. a photo). I'd like to be given the option to include that information in the video.
Why oh why can't we save driving directions as a collection? If we could then we could easily reproduce driving directions as a video of the planned route.

I've got a few more ideas but that's enough for now.

Great stuff.

-Jamie

HD View and Virtual Earth love-in

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 18:32:03 GMT

A few weeks ago I wrote this little ditty proclaiming how I suspected that Virtual Earth and SideStreet would eventually incorporate some technology from Photosynth, Seadragon and/or HDView.

Well I haven't been proved right yet (am I ever??) but clearly someone (step forward Johannnes Kebeck/Johann Eskebeck/Johan Neskebeck *) is thinking along similar lines because he has produced a very interesting mashup of Virtual Earth and HD View. Go here to have a look at it (its very impressive) and here to see what he has to say about it.

Good stuff!

-Jamie

*Apologies for getting your name wrong at least twice

Virtual Earth, calling Side Street. Come in SideStreet. Over...

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 02:30:17 GMT

[This blog entry was originally published here]

Perhaps it really is over!!

There was an interesting internal email thread within Conchango today which began with an email from Simon Knightley saying this:

I recently came across Microsoft’s response to Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth at http://maps.live.com/
If you select the 3D option and install the active X control, you get all the functionality of Google Earth without leaving your browser, with an easy to navigate interface.
Microsoft may not be product innovators, but they certainly know how to roll up their corporate sleeves and respond to the market.

Whilst I'm sure this is nice to hear for those at Virtual Earth it begs the question why it has taken such a long time for Simon (who happens to be a very smart, clued-up guy, by the way) to become aware of it. After all, it was released at least 9 months ago. Yet again Microsoft seem to be doing a very poor job of telling people about their Windows Live offerings although I heard on the QT today from someone internal at Microsoft that now they are into fiscal 2008 the marketing heat is going to be turned up.

In response to Simon's email I forwarded a link to a collection I built recently that included this 3D view of Las Vegas that caused Rob Grigg to comment "This looks like flight sim online". The more interesting reply though came from Ciaran Hanway who had this to say:

Google Earth has Google Street view, which I think is infintely better for the voyeuristic among us:

http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/

The Geek in the video explains it all very well. You can zoom down to specially-photographed streets and have a rotating view of the street level. Only a few major cities have been photographed, but apparently, there are a lot of Google vans being spotted doing the rounds and taking photos.

Ciaran raises a great point. The viral mouth-to-mouth that accompanied Google StreetView's release has helped to make it far more well-known and far more well-received than Virtual Earth 3D. That then got me thinking; what has happened to Microsoft's like-for-like offering Sidestreet which they first brought to an unsuspecting public (wait for it) EIGHTEEN MONTHS ago. I suspect they are still planning to bring this but since Google beat them to the punch and released StreetView the game has changed a little and Microsoft need to do something even better or they might as well not bother. Hence, I suspect that when Sidestreet does finally get released it will look a lot different than it did 18 months ago and will probably include some aspects of one or more of the fantastic photo technologies Photosynth, Seadragon and HDView.

-Jamie

P.S. If driving around city streets takes your fancy then check out http://www.livederby2007.com/. Perfect Friday lunchtime filler if you happen to be somewhere other than in the pub. If you liked Pacman back in the 80s then you'll love this.

Live Maps demo video

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 01:46:49 GMT

[This blog was originally published here]

I have spoken before about just how cool I think the Live Maps experience is and I also said that the Live team needed to start spreading the word about it better than they are doing at the moment. Well, perhaps they took me at my word because today the Canadian Live team have released this 6 minute video that shows off some of the features including the best one of all, 3D maps.

If you've got any interest in mapping technology at all then this is well worth a look.

Oh, and thanks to Steve Clayton for the tip.

-Jamie

Windows Live: New release from the Virtual Earth team

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 01:42:08 GMT

[This blog was originally published here]

As reported here on the Virtual Earth blog there was a new release of Virtual Earth recently. Normally interim releases wouldn't be very interesting but there's some new functionality that I requested a while back and I'm thrilled that its now in there.

Namely, you can now measure the distance of routes. This is really useful if, for example, you go for a daily run or bike ride and want to know how far you've been. Observe:

[Click through on the map to get the full Virtual Earth navigation experience]

Equally as cool, as you're drawing the route you get a tooltip showing distance so far:

I think that's really useful and, therefore, really cool. Virtual Earth continues to leave Google Maps standing yet still everyone is still using Google. Perhaps Microsoft need to start shouting louder about it?

-Jamie