Integrating Microsoft Virtual Earth in WinTOTAL and XSites
Satellite and aerial photography has become one of the coolest, most useful technologies to come along in some time. For the first time in cartographic history, someone looking at a map can actually see a picture, or several pictures, of a spot on a map from different altitudes, angles and directions. Mapping is no longer a top-down look at city streets and roads. It's pictures, geocoded, and tied to a spot on a map. And it's something you'll see in WinTOTAL and XSites very, very soon.
In case you've been living under a rock and have never seen this technology, here are the big players:
Why are we experimenting with this? Sure, it's cool and cutting edge, but it has some very real practical applications for appraisers. Your clients are very interested in each piece of property they pay you to appraise. If they weren't, they wouldn't order from you in the first place (sleazebags excluded of course). They want a map because to see where the property sits and how the comparables relate. Aerial photography shows an actual photo of the property from above. Are any light bulbs going off yet?
What a differentiator for appraisers! Being able to include aerial and "oblique" imagery is a great way to set yourself apart from competitors. Your clients will appreciate having the extra visual information these kinds of photos supply. Does that sound a little "salesy"? It should, because that's how you need to be thinking about it in relation to your own business. It's something you can use to set yourself apart.
So why are we experimenting with this technology? Because we want to make it brain-dead simple to get these images into reports. You can do it manually now, but by integrating it seamlessly in WinTOTAL we'll be able to save you time.
Why Virtual Earth and not others? In our opinion, the two major players in the aerial imagery and mapping game are Microsoft Virtual Earth (we call it VE) and Google maps. We went with VE because after doing our homework, it's the best fit for appraisers.
Why is it the best fit? Two reasons: Desktop PCs and oblique imagery. As vast as the empire of Google has become, they're simply not set up to allow Internet maps to be cached and saved to a hard drive where they can be stored in your appraisal reports digitally and added to your forms. And, they have no desire to do so as was explained to us by several Google representatives. VE does and can. 1 point for VE.
Oblique imagery is a really nice touch as well. "Oblique's" are images from roughly a 45 degree angle to the property. Google doesn't have this. VE does. 1 point for VE. Virtual Earth has an included tool called Bird's Eye imagery. You can toggle this oblique imagery on and off, and rotate it 360 degrees around the property. These are high resolution images, and wonderfully show the area surrounding a property in much better detail than a simple top-down photo. With Google Earth, you can tilt the image, but it's just a flat view of the same top down image. Bird's Eye imagery is "3D" in the sense that you're seeing different pictures from different angles, 360 degrees around the property you're viewing.
Also, after digging in to the subject of accuracy, some interesting things came to light. I'll spare you the boring details and say simply that all mapping vendors (Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, or whoever) get their address/geodata from the same source, Navteq. The only thing the mapping vendors have control over is the "presentation" layer we see when using their products. We've seen that VE is more accurate in some areas, Google in others, and Yahoo! more accurate in yet other areas. No vendor has everything mapped 100% accurately, and given the tools VE has available, it's clearly the best option for us to implement.
How does it work? 
We think this is interesting. You'll notice when using any previously mentioned vendor's site that you can click on the map and drag it around. You don't have to click an up, down, left or right arrow. And, you can scroll in and out using your mouse wheel. How does it do that?
What you see on screen is actually a series of individual map tiles that are cached on your computer and stitched together in real time. They're typically pretty small (256 X 256 or so) so they can download quickly. When viewing the map on your monitor, it also downloads the panels for the map in area surrounding the map offscreen, in anticipation of you moving the map. This is what gives the impression that you can move the map around seamlessly without having to reload, refresh or download anything. Pretty cool, eh? So as you click and drag, pan or zoom, you're not constantly having to redownload a map like you do in WinTOTAL now.
Another neat bit of trivia is that these maps are made up of a combination of satellite and aerial imagery. You'll notice that as you scroll further and further out, the images often are suddenly black and white, and in many cases are no longer high resolution. This is because the system has transitioned from aerial photography provided by airplanes, to satellite imagery.
Here's how the aerial photos are actually made. Click here for a video.
What about your Internet connection? One thing we've kept in mind is that not everyone has a high speed internet connection. A significant number of our users are in rural areas, or for whatever reason are stuck with dial-up or satellite connections. So, we're planning to give users the choice to use the MapPoint maps (what WinTOTAL users have now) or Virtual Earth maps and images. Because Microsoft is letting us have our cake and eat it too, we're going to make sure you can also.
Will Virtual Earth be available in Armstrong or Aurora? Both. VE will be added to both the current version of WinTOTAL, Aurora, and the upcoming version of WinTOTAL that's in development now, codenamed Armstrong.
Ready to try out? Then you need to read this. . .
Let's be very, very clear here. This is a "proof of concept" test application. This hasn't been added to the Map Wizard, hasn't been debugged, and doesn't have all the regular features in it that you use in WinTOTAL now.
The point of this "proof of concept" is to show how the click/drag, panning, zooming, aerial imagery, hybrid maps and Bird's Eye imagery will/could function in WinTOTAL. Getting Internet maps cached and working in a desktop application is something that is rather unique. We had to make sure it could even be done.
WARNING: This is VERY COOL, but very rough. Also, downloading and running this WILL NOT affect any other version of WinTOTAL on your PC. It's a completely different animal written in C# and using a separate set of system files.
