News: Google and Microsoft aim to give you a 3-D world

By Brad Stone
Newsweek

Nov. 20, 2006 issue - The sky over San Francisco is cerulean blue as you begin your descent into the city from 2,000 feet. As you pass over the southern hills, the skyline of the Financial District rises into view. On the descent into downtown, familiar skyscrapers form an urban canyon around you; you can even see the trolley tracks running down the valley formed by Market Street. But then a little pop-up box next to the Bay Bridge explains that an accident has just occurred on the west-ern span, and a thick red line indicates the resulting traffic jam along the highway. A banner ad for Emeryville, Calif., firm ZipRealty hangs incongruously in the air over the Transamerica Pyramid. You are actually staring at your PC screen, not out an airplane window.

Virtual Earth 3D, the online service unveiled last week by Microsoft, is both incomplete (only 15 cities are depicted in 3-D) and imperfect (some of the buildings are shrouded in shadow, and you need a powerful PC running Windows XP or the new Vista to use it). But it is also the start of something potentially big: the 3-D Web. Traditional Web pages give us text, photos and video, unattached to real-world context. Now interactive mapping programs like Google Earth let us zoom around the globe on our PCs and peer down at the topography captured by satellites and aerial photographers. Both Google Earth and Microsoft's Virtual Earth are hugely popular and have been downloaded more than 100 million times each.

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[Folks, we can build 4D maps of the real world in a much faster and more reliable way, right? -Bob]