SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft’s Live Search has a new look.
Microsoft’s search and ad teams trekked south to San
Francisco last night to celebrate the launch of Virtual Earth 3D, a new online
mapping interface for its Live Search offering. It provides city
imagery in the round.
When Live Search users click on the “maps” tab, search
results appear in a map context with the option of exploring the area
using not only the standard aerial and bird’s-eye views, but also
three-dimensional models.
So far, 3D views are available for 15 U.S. cities. Steven
Lawler, general manager of Virtual Earth, said Microsoft plans to
roll out more as fast as possible.
According to Jim Gray, a distinguished engineer with Microsoft
Research, models are made by overlaying photographic images over 3D
models.
Over time, he said, it should be possible to use consumer-generated content to create some of the models. For example, everyone who goes to Paris takes a picture of Notre Dam. And Yahoo’s Flickr photo-sharing service has implemented geo-tagging for pix
uploaded from mobile cameras, using the location information provided
by cell providers.
Add that to the tagging done within social media, and it should be possible to find enough third-party photos to skin that 3D model of Notre Dam.
Still to be determined would be rights and permissions. Flickr
allows users to add Creative Commons licenses to the public photos
they post, but defining whether or when Microsoft’s use would be
commercial would be a gnarly problem.
Some data overlays are available within the service, including
real-time traffic information for some cities, so that someone could
not only see the route she’d be driving but also see how bad traffic
was. Yellow and white pages listings let you not only find someone’s
home or business but also call them with one click.
Microsoft has made Virtual Earth 3D available to third-party Tools available at the Live Developers portal let The World’s a Game “Mapping is moving to a very dynamic realm, and starting to look Microsoft already is demonstrating some advertising, taking Ads can tie searchers directly to information and e-commerce. For “They’re standard display ads placed within the 3D environment,” Today, the ads are targeted by location. “It’s a hyper-local At this point, the Virtual Earth ads are being sold by ad reps, “All these brands are racing into [online virtual world] Second
developers through open application programming interfaces
developers mash up services and install Live functionality without
having to write code.
more like gaming,” said analyst Greg Sterling, principal of Sterling
Market Intelligence. He said that Virtual Earth 3D brings the
flyover, zoom-in functionality of the downloadable Google Earth into
the browser window, making it more broadly accessible. “There are
lots of interesting possibilities with this,” he added, “including
social applications, advertising, and the ability to embed video or
e-commerce in this environment.”
advantage of technology acquired with its purchase of Massive earlier
this year. Massive offers a platform for dynamically serving and
tracking advertisements into online games, so that, for example,
every time a player walks by a billboard, a new ad appears on it.
example, someone searching for the title of a film on the Seattle map
would see numbers on the map corresponding to theaters where the film
was showing. Clicking on any number could bring up show times — and
let the searcher buy tickets with a single click.
said Alex Daley, marketing manager for the Virtual Earth platform.
The placement is physical and based on real-world metrics, for
example, a billboard is 60 meters wide — not 100 pixels wide. That’s
important, because it ties the ad to the virtual view.
context,” Daley said. “Because I looked for that location, the ad is
relevant.” The goal is to eventually target the ads to individuals,
based on their profiles developed from their use of all MSN/Live services.
the old-fashioned way, to major national advertisers including
Toyota. But Massive’s technology already has been incorporated into
Microsoft’s adCenter search and display advertising platform, so
eventually, advertisers could buy search keywords, display ads on
MSN.com and a Phoenix billboard all from the same interface, and
track them all with the same analytics.
Life, setting up their virtual stores,” Sterling said. “This is not
that far removed. The nature of the environment is really engaging,
and people will want to get in front of users in that context.”
