Dr. Vincent Tao

This is based on my experience of moving from an academic research company moving to a big company like Microsoft.

What is the direction of VE?

What is Where 1.0 “The death of distance”

  • Social networks are independant of distance.
  • E-commerce is locationless
  • Search is universal: finding information anywhere

Where 2.0 “Location matters”

  • Concentration of human activities continue to grow
  • 72% of survey participants prefer to stay within a 20-minute drive of their homes to reach a business
  • 1/3 f search queries are local intent

Independant thinking is important.

“like keyword, location is basically an index to information and data organization”

“from organizing spatial information to organizing information spatially”

“moving from W3 to W4”

W4: what, where, when and who

“How do people look for local information?”

“How do people look for information ‘indexed’ by location?”

Looking at entry points, we have local search mapping. Looking at the larger entrypoints:

  • Search
  • Portal
  • Community - social networks
  • Gaming
  • Entertainment
  • Commerce
  • Communication

In this context LBS gives a value-add, not a primary driver to the site.

Where do people look for local info?

  • PC - 71%
  • Phone (Voice) 5%
  • Phone (Data) 2&
  • In-vehicle devices 1%

When we look at your life, we feel your home-life is getting blurred, where is location? Location is enabling pieces for the services.

Virtual Earth is an enabling platform - millions of earths!

A few weeks ago we launched mobile search with “image mapping, real-time traffic, voice search”. We have voice recognition for location search too.

VE embedded with messenger. Can share locations with people, realtor, travel agent.

VE add-in for Outlook. Massive user of office and outlook. Book meetings with customers and partners, totally free. Can alert you to leave the office when there’s traffic.

VE with SQL Spatial Server - powerful combination of two products for professional users.

VE: the largest mapping project ever in industry

  • imagery coverage of 80% population
  • 500 world wide 3D city models
  • rich and in-depth local contents

Must plan very careful and not make any mistake.

Investment in high resolution images (6cm). 220M pixels. Showing picture of traffic accident. These images could have a lot of uses.

Automated image processing pipeline. Automated alimination of moving autos by comparing multiple overlapping pictures.

Automated 3D city model generation. Reduced polygons and real templates. Building models for 20-30 cities per month. This is an automated pipeline.

Virtual Earth v2 cities. Much more upgraded texture and quality, real, environment.

Comparing a real photo with a screenshot from VE. Automatic placing of trees and models. They did miss the lamp post though.

Comparing a photo of a golf course “Bali Hai” to 3D model, it’s very similar.

Also crowd sourcing, 3D model of stadium.

Map of China showing the effects of the recent earthquake.

Showing vegas 3D model. For the v2 cities, we have even the smaller buildings which we didn’t have before.

Showing bird’s eye imagery on vegas. 3D looks very similar to the bird’s eye.

“Virtual Earth : your own photo experiences”

Geo registration software to embed photos into virtual earth. Overlaying photos onto virtual earth to recreate the views. Not sure how you do the geo registration. Coming is 3D simulation of sunsets and shadows. Embedding street images in 3D world.

Where is the “Where?”

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