It must be SIGGRAPH time :-) The parade of eye candy, and more importantly the brain candy that makes it possible, has begun. Photosysnth is a huge collaborative effort between Microsoft Live Labs (including Seadragon), Microsoft Research, The University of Washington, and various product groups around Microsoft such as PIX and VE. It provides a system for automatically registering 2d photos in the 3d world and fluidly browsing them. Photosysnth is at its best when it has a huge library of photos to work off of, all taken from the same geographic area. The various videos that are circulating the net show this off far better than I can try to explain it. The end result is simply amazing. I first saw this demoed a few months back and was pretty blown away. The technology has come a long way since then as the team prepares for a public release, but this original video is the best public explanation I have seen of the software.

Jason Fuller keeps plugging away at this amazing application for your Windows Mobile Phone! You can Download and install the latest version here. It works on both Pocket PC and Smartphones. the impressive feature list includes position determining via WiFi or GPS, street and landmark lookups in all geographies supported by Virtual Earth, Yellow page and business searches, routing and driving directions, and the ability to cache maps locally on your device giving you access to maps when you are not in a coverage area. Version 1.64 is the latest and well worth the 2 minutes it will take to upgrade if you are running a previous release

This week we rolled out a new release of Live Local featuring full support for Australia

 

Street Address Lookups (geocoding) - Try entering 27 Polglass Way, Ardross, WA , AU in the WHERE field. If your map view is centered somewhere in Australia, you of course don't need to specify the country and can just enter 27 Polglass Way, Ardross, WA

 

Driving Directions - Get directions between addresses, landmarks, or just right click on the map to set a waypoint. Here is a route from the Rocks to Perth - its a 48 hour drive. bring lots of water.

 

Business Listing search and overlay. View up to three layers of Business listings at a time. move around the map and watch them refresh automatically. here is a query in Brisbane for Hotels, Pharmacies and Cassinos

 

Detailed street network and Aerial Imagery - Until now WLL has had major city coverage in AU, but with this release we have rolled out a detailed national street network based on data from MapData Sciences. GeoEye is supplying lots of high res aerial imagery for major cities as well.

 

Full API and Developer support - Get started with the Virtual Earth interactive SDK. Application developers have access to everything mentioned here making adding location services to your website a snap.

 

COLLECTIONS! - People have been creating Collection in AU since we launched the feature a few months ago, but now you can view and create on a much improved base of imagery and streets. Here are a few to get you started. If you create a Collection you want to share with the world, be sure to post it to Pass The POI.

The Live Toolbar plugin for Internet Explorer is now available here. It has some nice features, including a number of mapping related tools:

 

1. Recognize addresses on a web page and map all of them at once. This is great when you are at a webpage like this with a bunch of addresses and you want to see them all on a map at once to compare them. with one click in Live Toolbar the addresses are passed to Live Local as a new scratchpad. You can view them, save them as a Collection, or share them with a friend. See the OSF screenshot below. One thing i really like about this feature is that the recognizer apparently is parsing the DOM in realtime, so it is compatible with AJAX sites, web forms and web editors! It not only parses the initially loaded page, but if an Asynchronous call is made to the server that delivers address information to the web page, they appear in the dropdown list as well.

 

2. get interactive inline maps on any web page. with Toolbar installed, whenever you highlight some text on a webpage a smart menu appears with a list of ways to operate on the selected text. if the text you selected is a street address, one of the choices will be to see a map right there on the webpage without having to surf off to a mapping site. very convenient! See the Showbox screenshot below

 

 

Here is a list of more features in the toolbar.

 

 

This is quite a nicely done tutorial, not just on the basics of embedding Virtual Earth in a web page, but also on how to embed a web page in a winform app. It covers how to do IP address geocoding in your applications, and uses VE's polyline API to visualize the tracert path.