February 13
Virtual Earth Platform and Navteq Data featured in NYC Transit Planner
Here's a Press release from New York City Transit about their new online trip planner that i came across via SlashGeo. If you're in NYC you can use the app at http://tripplanner.mta.info/ The VE Gov blog has lots of detail on the application along with some nice screenshots. The 3D visualization features are really useful in this type of application. Birds Eye imagery would be as well, but for some reason the developer has disabled it in this application. In the screenshot below, i've entered 3D mode but turned off the building textures using Shift-D (you can turn the buildings off entirely if you wish using Shift-B). reducing the level of detail in this manner provides a more cartooney representation of the world that is alien to most VE3D users but can be useful in cases like this where you want to see the cityscape as a block diagram to orient yourself first, before adding the detail back in. These keystrokes should work in any VE application unless the developer wanted to disable them.
Another interesting application note - the Subway layer was created by taking a traditional NYC transit map and registering it in Mapcruncher. get the latest supported version of mapcruncher here.
