Category: Thoughts

OK I do have a ban on use the phrase “ Killer”, but the latest post on the Virtual Earth Spaces got me thinking about a interview I heard on NPR Monday. Basically people are trying to make a buck off of Second Life by creating their own storefronts in Second Life. Why invest in such a virtual world when you could invest in the real world. Rather than going to second life to check out the new Prius, just fire up Virtual Earth 3D and visit the local showroom in your own town (or across the state) and see what they have in inventory. No sense putting crazy Second Life accessories on your new car if you can’t get them were you live. Sure it might be fun to drive the Prius off of a cliff in Second Life, but reality is where real money is made.

Imagine going on vacation and being able to walk around a city seeing where all the sites are before you visit. This has been talked about before with digital globes, but I think Microsoft just figured it out. I’m hooked guys!

I admit it, I’m baiting Frank, but eye candy is a big part of these digital globes. Sure you can download a model for Google Earth, but you have to visit another site. I’d love to see some sort of connection to the 3D Warehouse from inside Google Earth.

Google Earth – Las Vegas

Microsoft Virtual Earth – Las Vegas

**Update – ** to be fair to Google Earth and Google’s 3D Warehouse, I’ve revisited this comparison in another post this morning.

Google Earth vs. Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D Revisited

More Microsoft Virtual Earth news in the Microsoft category

Google Earth has more 3D models available than any other digital globe and thanks to Frank for getting me a link to AT&T Park in San Francisco (I’m a huge SF Giants fan) from the Google 3D Warehouse. The 3D Warehouse is very easy to use, just click on the “View in Google Earth 4” and you see the result below.

Compare this to the Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D view:

The Google 3D Warehouse model is so much more detailed than the default Virtual Earth model. The biggest problem with this method that Google uses is the background. With Virtual Earth you get the whole city in the background and in Google Earth you get nothing (if you turn on the 3D buildings they cause problems with the AT&T Park model, not that you’d want them on anyway). So I do agree, you can’t compare Virtual Earth’s 3D cities with some of the wonderful models in the Google 3D Warehouse, but when looked at as a whole Microsoft’s method I think works better.

I see that ESRI has posted their presentation on historic map effects with ArcGIS from the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS), NACIS 2006 conference. I’m not sure how much demand there is for these kinds of effects, but it is so damn cool that you have to take a look. Everything is included along with notes on how to create the effects. I wish they wouldn’t dump this stuff in the Basemap data models page as I think it gets lost in the shuffle, but I’m glad to see some new Desktop tips and tricks.

Someone emailed me worried that Slashgeo had shut down. They wondered what happened to the http://slashgeo.com/ website. I reminded them that the correct url is Slashgeo.org, but was surprised to see what was at the Slashgeo.com website. The link is NOT SAFE FOR WORK so be careful if you click on it.

Interesting idea, but it doesn’t make me want to buy anything. Still probably more eyes than buying space inside Second Life.

More Microsoft Virtual Earth news in the Virtual Earth category

Click for larger view

So I figure I’d fire up another browser window and search another city and was stopped in my tracks.

That red text is a little hard to read IMO.

More Microsoft Virtual Earth news in the Microsoft category

3D is no longer just the domain of ESRI, Google and NASA. Microsoft has released their Virtual Earth 3D. What is different about Microsoft’s digital globe is that it runs inside your web browser. I’ll have to play with it some more when I get off of work, but it is visually amazing. It streams much slower than GE, but the detail is many times better. Click images for larger view:

The Digital Globe View

The detail of the 3D cities is way beyond Google Earth

Take a spin down the Las Vegas Strip

But, Tempe is still low resolution

It works with Internet Explorer 6 or 7, so Firefox users will have to wait for Microsoft to release a DirectX Firefox add-on (if that is possible).

Well isn’t that some good news. We’ve all been talking ourselves into a depressing spiral, but maybe some nice Web ADF stuff is around the corner. Art Haddad has got the news on his blog plus some ArcGIS Server Web ADF tips and tricks. I’m sure all this .NET stuff is getting Sean all excited.

ESRI has updated their “ArcGIS Product Life Cycle” to indicate that the current release of ArcGIS (the one we all have in our production environments) is now in extended support. It isn’t that big of a difference between extended and general support, but the timing of this is a little weird. Even in ESRI’s product life cycle description it says:

For example, ArcGIS 8.2 transitioned to the Extended Support Phase 3 months after ArcGIS 8.3 started shipping. The 3 months overlap takes into account the shipping time for a new release. It takes about 3 months for the majority of our users worldwide to receive a new release.

You’d think they’d hold off for a couple months, but then they’d have to certify 9.1 on Vista and I don’t think they wanted to do that.

ESRI will not certify new environments for products in this Extended Support phase. If an existing customer is contemplating migrating their environment then they should also consider an ESRI product migration as appropriate.

I think this is a little cheap of ESRI as many users won’t upgrade to 9.2 right away and who knows if any of them might have to run 9.1 on Vista because of their internal company policies. So if that new laptop your company just got you runs Vista only, then you might not be able to run ArcGIS 9.1 even if you don’t get your shipment of ArcGIS 9.2 until months later.

Jei has his own theory as to the why on his blog, but my mind says it is all about Microsoft Vista. Jei might be right, but the only big difference between the two service levels is the “new environment certification”:

when a major new release of an operating system, database, or web server is released during the General Availability phase of an ESRI product, ESRI will test this new environment with the General Availability release and provide test result information on its Online Support Center.

Moving 9.1 to extended support means they can ignore certifying ArcGIS 9.1 on Vista and for many companies that is enough not to run 9.1 on Vista (even if you can).