3D Birds Eye View in Live Search Maps

Over on the Virtual Earth/Live Maps blog is a very cool preview of an upcoming Live Maps feature called Birds Eye View. Since Birds Eye 3D navigation is made up of multiple images shot from different angles, there isn’t an easy way to stitch them together seamlessly, so you end up with distinct “scenes” as opposed to one giant tapestry, like you would with traditional satellite imagery. As you navigate to the edge of one “scene”, the most appropriate next scene is dynamically determined and displays. Inside these scenes (the boxes), the area switches from being a 3D model representation of the view to an actual Birds Eye photograph. With a user interface that borrows concepts from Photosysnth, the blog post states, “you can navigate more fluidly and naturally than what is possible with a javascript based client. It’s totally sick.”

I agree, it is totally sick…but this is really something that really has to be seen, not described: