What is Microsoft's equivalent of maps.google ??
I talking about the one with street view drive-around stuff.
I ask because a job we did a couple had one of those heavily camered up trucks drive right by me. The drive-by view at google shows the site with the shed in the back yard that we knocked down.
I'll bet I'm on camera on MS's drive-by. They went within a few feet of me that day.
I am on camera on google drive-by. I'm sitting outside reading with a beer and there I am in plain site!!
E.
"I am on camera on google drive-by. I'm sitting outside reading with a beer and there I am in plain site!!"
Shocking! I never would have guessed that.;-)
MS does not currently do drive by on their website. They have quite excellent aerial at an angle. The resolution is good enough in a lot of them that you can count the crossties on a track and you can often choose from the cardinal directions, thereby allowing you to locate a pesky switch.
Bing maps hangs up IE8 on my computer for some reason.
Bing maps does have streetside. It looks like they're starting with major metropolitan areas.
How good are the coordinates on Bing?
I see lots of places on Google Earth where their registration is off by orders of magnitude more than the resolution. I took rec-grade GPS readings, averaged waypoints under almost ideal conditions, at two road intersections a mile apart. I would expect them to be within 10 ft with decent probability, and if the signal propagation had them off more at that particular time they should be off the same direction.
Plotting them on GE shows one off 44 ft west and the other one off 25 ft east on the photos, with an obvious mismatch in the photos in between.
Often it is better, but this case was pretty bad.
Google Earth photos do not appear to be ortho-rectified very well, if at all.
My understanding is that Google Earth Pro images are much better... however, I do not have any real-world experience with that.
I have had no problem with either of them with the work we have been doing. If I type in the decimal lat and decimal long, They are accurate enough that when I turn on aerials I can see where switches are on good aerial imagery with and typically the pin is right within a few feet of where the lat long is hitting. Are you converting your lat long to decimal?
I have yet to see one area in bing maps that has a street view version. That includes major cities on the east coast or even in Chicago. Is it hidden under the 3D tab? Aerials and birds eye are available in 2D.
I had approximate waypoints marked in Google Earth. When I display the properties, they are in deg min sec.decimals and I edited their values to the measured numbers.
Significant digits? Uncorrect GPS on the handheld that bad off? Ours is from PMV which uses the Omnistar correction. It gets pretty close.
GE will take the coordinates in either decimal degrees or dms. I had read them out of the handheld unit as ddd.ddddd which is its most precise format (increments of 3.6 ft in latitude) to be sure I had better precision than accuracy, and also get the same results that way as with dms.
Bing maps has much better agreement with my two points, perhaps within 5-10 feet for each. But I'm not sure if there is a way to show multiple waypoints at once on that display. I may install the Bing 3D option (big download) to see if that looks more like GE.
Streetside imagery with Bing maps @ Microsoft
I believe selected West coast cities are covered by Streetside. I think Vancouver BC, Seattle and San Francisco are partially covered. Here's a link to a Vancouver BC view. You may need silverlight plugin from Microsoft. Vancouver BC Bing Map with streetside function
The key to being able to use it is using www.bing.com/maps/explore.
The images are seemingly seamless.
I hope this helps.
phd
