bing.com Gets 3D Maps
Jun 3rd, 2009 by MrGroove
This morning I started playing with the new 3d Maps Service over on bing.com. You can grab the free download here which will plug-in to your IE install. The service will install Virtual Earth however when launched it will take you over to Bing.com.
The engine looks a lot like the legacy Virtual Earth and runs completely in the IE Browser (No Firefox Support yet as far as I can tell).
Personally I think they still have a little bit of work to do on this one mainly because after launch of the app, I noticed my computer really bogging down… Looking in Task Manager I found the culprit:
The system settled down after a few minutes however after using Virtual Earth / BING 3D Maps for a few minutes playing around with a few of the features the Memory usage climbed to over 500 megs and my CPU continued to spike between 15-30% (2 proc’s). My guess is the spike are from the app download the Map data and images.
Another interesting thing to note is the partnership they appear to have formed with 3dVia. If you want to grab the Bing.com / Virtual Earth plug-in, here’s the download Link. I didn’t have time to play around with it yet however it looks like they are adding in the same functionality as Google Sketchup. Here’s a screen shot of the page:
Just more groovy stuff coming from Bing.com. I’m sure as the week and the brand progress we will continue to see more and more.
Tags: 3d, bing, download, Google, Microsoft, plug-in
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Hopefully this won’t be stepping on your toes too much but here are a few facts:
1: Virtual Earth|Bing Maps 3D Beta does work in both Internet Explorer 6+7+8 as well as Firefox 2+3. (Firefox support was added 2007 April 03.)
2: Other than the updated logo in the bottom left hand corner and the removal of the “realtime weather” feature, this is the same exact release from earlier this year (2009 April 09) when it was still ‘Virtual Earth’ on ‘Live Search Maps’.
3: 3DVia’s modeling tool for Virtual Earth debuted back on 2007 October 20. I’ll grant you that it’s been updated since, but you seemed to think that it was a completely new venture.
None of this is to say that what you point out isn’t great, because it’s excellent! It’s just not quite the ‘news’ that you perhaps thought it was.
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