I'm so glad to finally announce that the latest version of Live Maps is online and ready for you to play with. This ended up being a much bigger release than originally planned including three full sprints of development. As always the changes visible in the user interface only scratch the surface of the dozens of improvements across the application tiers including Geocoding enhancements, browser compatibility (Safari and IE8), parsing improvements, reverse geocoding, printing improvements and tons more. We are also releasing an upgrade of our Map Control to version 6.1 for developers. Give it a try and let us know what you think by dropping a comment here or emailing me at Stevelom at microsoft d com.

Export your Collection to Your Navigation/GPS device. One of the most common complaints we hear from users is that there is no easy way to get waypoints onto their Nav system from a web map. In this release we added support to export Collections to KML, GPX and GeoRSS which you can load directly to just about any portable Navigation system. No funky network links to get in your way - when you do an export the resulting file contains the geometry your nav system needs without having to be connected to the net. You can now plan your trip on the web by creating a Collection of Waypoints, then use the Export feature to take them with you on the road.

This Export capability isn't limited to use on Nav systems of course. the exported files are standard KML, GPX or GeoRSS and can be used in any application compatible with one of these file formats. You can import a KML file and convert it to GeoRSS for instance. Or Export a Collection to view it in Google Earth. Or convert a GeoRSS feed to GPX... 

Improved 3D cities. Our new 'Version 2' cities are much more densely modeled, feature higher resolution textures, and include rendered trees. Cities now have thousands more buildings than before especially noticeable as you move from a city core out to its suburbs. It all adds up to make Virtual Earth much less virtual and takes us a large step closer to delivering a truly impressive mirror world experience. Initially Las Vegas, Dallas, Denver and Phoenix have received the v2 face lift, but all future cities will get these enhancements with hundreds being online before the end of the year.

Denver and Vegas
 

3D modeling with 3DVIA - Not only has the interactive 3D environment been greatly enhanced for this release, but our modeler for creating your own buildings and structures in the virtual world is improved. To try it out, switch into 3D view, right click where you would like to add a building and choose 'Add 3D model'. the 3DVIA editor will launch and you are on your way to adding a building to Virtual Earth. Improvements include lighting for contributed models, creation of preview thumbnails when you save a model, and much faster publishing when using high resolution textures.

Labels for Birds Eye imagery - Until now our Birds Eye imagery has been naked and you've had to rely on the inset map or toggling back to traditional map and aerial views to see street and building labels. Calculating labels in 45 degree oblique imagery is a whole lot harder than labeling ortho imagery. Things like building occlusions become a challenge especially because you are dealing with a photo and not a 3d representation. Now you can toggle labels for Birds eye imagery in the same way that you control labels on aerial imagery. The experience when using Birds eye on our site should now be practically identical to the other map styles. Since labels have appeared on the Birds Eye scenes, I find I do most of my searching and exploration in This mode now and rarely switch back to Aerial unless I want to see a large area at once.

1-Click Directions (Party Maps!) - The 1-Click Directions maps are now interactive and support clickable hotspots and popups on hoverand the overall presentation is as crisp and clean as a 7-up. Try one. The page header also makes it easier to share your party map. Party maps are great when you are somewhat familiar with an area and don't need detailed steps for your entire route, and of course they are ideal for sharing with a large group of folks converging on a single location.

MapCruncher Integration! I can't tell you how excited I am about this one! You probably know MapCruncher as a tool for registering your raster maps to create map tiles for mashups. You can now add your MapCrunched layers to Collections to share with others right inside of virtual earth! While editing your Collection choose the new 'Actions -> Add MapCruncher Layer' menu choice, specify the URL pointing to your Crunch and an Opacity value and you're done. You can share the Collection just like any other. Other folks using the Explore feature can find and view your Crunched maps as well.

Pre and post crunch views of Super Bowl Champion New York Giant's stadium with a seating chart added
 

What else can you crunch? just about anything. University/Campus maps, transit maps, GIS based renderings, custom flown aerial imagery... I'll dedicate a full post to MapCruncher in the next couple of days to dig deeper into this one! In the meanwhile, check out this Collection that contains an aerial view of Burning man, a transit map for Seattle, and a couple other crunches.

Enhanced Explore of Map Content from across the web contributed by other People - That's a mouthful and I'm just as sick of saying 'Geoweb' as you are of hearing it ;-) But lets call this one GeoWeb Exploration anyway to save me some keystrokes. We crawl the web for geographic content and combine it with our Collections data, all contributed by other people. Collectively this becomes one of the largest stores of local content on the web and is often referred to as the 'Geoweb'. To turn on Explore use the 'Collections -> Explore' menu. As you drag and zoom the map, your results will continuously refresh. In this release we have improved the filtering options while you are in Explore mode allowing you to view only items that contain Photos, Mapcruncher layers or 3D models. The Collection or KML file that contains any given result can be opened with one click and viewed in place.

Neighborhood Subscribe via GeoRSS - I'm biased as this is the feature area I work on here on the VE team, but this is one of my favorite new features. basically it gives you the ability to zoom in the map to any area of interest, then pluck an RSS feed to stay up to date on goings on in the region. the RSS feed will be populated by spatially querying our GeoWeb library as described above. What would you use this for? grab an RSS feed for your neighborhood to be kept up to date on all contributions from your neighbors. or grab a feed for a city you will be visiting soon. Grabbing a feed is simple and interactive - While in Explore mode as described in the previous section, hit the   link to get the RSS URL. You can add it to any RSS reader and each time you view it the most recent entries for the area will be displayed.

Tour Enhancements including Hi-Def Movies. Last release we introduced the Tour feature, which allows you to share interactive Tours of Live maps Collections in 3D and save them as medium res movies for sites like You Tube and Soapbox. You can now set your video output size all the way up to 1920X1080 resolution at 30 frames per second to true High def quality renderings! Additionally you have more control during the recording process of icon and photo display, data rates, titles and more. To the Right is a look at the options panel for Video Recording.

Directions and Traffic Enhancements: Earlier today I mentioned this feature area when i pointed to the New York Times article about Clearflow. Traffic based routing now uses MSR’s ClearFlow technology to predict side street traffic based on what is happening in the live feed we get from traffic.com. When you choose the 'Route around Traffic' option you will get much more accurate travel times and improved routes. We have also added a bunch more cities that we are covering with Traffic flow data from Traffic.com. You'll not only notice much better coverage in Major Metro areas in the US, but greater coverage in the burbs and between cities as well.

Improved display of KML files including Google MyMaps links - using the mapurl= parameter you can view a KML file hosted on the web without having to import it. In this release we improved our KML support to handle custom icons much better, Network links, and Google my maps links. Here are some examples:

Platial Map of 'Stuff I went to"
http://maps.live.com/?v=2&encType=1&mapurl=http://platial.com/kml/map%2F14234

KML file of Spain landmarks from VirtualGlobetrotting.com
http://maps.live.com/?v=2&encType=1&mapurl=http://virtualglobetrotting.com/countries/ES/export-0.kml

Google MyMap of PA and NJ Winter Camping
http://maps.live.com/?mapurl=http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=106153747529313402323.0004436802fc4f0bd0b94

Your feedback and feature requests are truly important to us in shaping future releases. have a look at our latest work and let us know what you think. its never to early to let us know what you want to see in the next release.