Cat leaves bag
Posted by David on Monday, May 23, 2005 at 11:57 AM.
Today we announced Virtual Earth, AKA the enormous project that's been taking up all of my time.
I can't really say anything specific about it, but you can read the news stories about it to your hearts' content.
UPDATE: I've posted a PR video showing the site in use (windows media format only) in sizes large (9mb) and ginormous (21mb).
Can you tell I'm a proud poppa?
rfkj, on Tuesday, May 24, 2005 at 5:41 AM:
That "45-degree image" shot, that's not a satellite photo, correct? At least one of the articles you linked to implies that it is, but I read a different article that said that you've partnered with an aerial-photograph company to provide those views. If satellites are taking pictures with that resolution these days, I'm never going outside again.
David Adam Edelstein, on Tuesday, May 24, 2005 at 7:22 AM:
Yep, definitely aerial, from a company called Pictometry.
Karl, on Tuesday, May 24, 2005 at 10:49 AM:
Well, i do believe that the resolution of the updated KH-11 is approximately on that scale, though not at the off angles. And in fact, I was watching something on History or Discovery that eluded to realtime battlefield integration "being developed" to link sat, drones, and other sources to provice up to the second tactical info.
So along with the NSA operations in England to circumvent US jurisdiction, it's about time to dawn the ol' burka and go low-tech.
If you send a signal, it will be recieved.
Karl, on Wednesday, May 25, 2005 at 8:51 AM:
Just to be a dork about it, but the KH-11 was on it's 9th upgrade in 1992. The latest known evolution is the KH-11 Crystal, (likely a generation or two behind the actual) which has a reported resolution of 3cm at 300km.
So for all of you that are concerned about Big Brother, I believe that might slightly exceed the screen display resolution of the arial photography on the Google and MS Earth pages.
Makes me happy that the data collected far too bountiful to process.