Microsoft hit 3D on Google Earth

    Microsoft announced the start of cooperation with Dassault Systemes, which will work on various functions of Microsoft Virtual Earth, participate in the creation of 3D models, make them more realistic and attractive. Experts believe that in this way Microsoft recognized its own lag in the field of geo-information products from Google Earth

    Microsoft is haunted by the extraordinary popularity of Google Earth. Trying to increase the competitiveness of its own similar development - Virtual Earth - Microsoft entered into a cooperation agreement with Dassault Systemes, a company specializing in the development of software solutions for product lifecycle management (PLM) using the potential of 3D-images.

    The subject of the agreement is the work on various functions of Microsoft Virtual Earth. Dassault Systemes’s vast experience in creating 3D models will help make the product more realistic and informative, according to Microsoft. According to experts, currently, according to these two parameters - including the number of users and the sophisticated interface - Google Earth is noticeably winning compared to the Microsoft product. Currently, Microsoft plans to release a new version of Virtual Earth, which, according to developers, will work more stable, better and will contain more realistic models.

    In addition, the agreement will allow Virtual Earth users to add their own 3D models to objects already on the map.

    “The unprecedented growth in the popularity of geo-services and geo-interfaces - a fundamentally new class of digital geographic products - could not help but attract the attention of Microsoft, which has lagged behind rivals at a key stage in the competition for a new market,” says GIS expert Evgeny Yeremenchenko. - The very fact that Microsoft in order to develop a product that could compete with Google Earth, which became the standard of the geo-interface, required a contract with another company, said Microsoft recognized a significant technological gap in this area. This is also recognized as a "litmus test" in the field of GIS - by US federal agencies. So, NASA is adopting Google Earth, and the U.S. intelligence community is moving to using GML for its geodata, akin to that used in Google Earth KML. True, Microsoft claims that in the near future Virtual Earth will significantly outperform its competitors in its functionality. However, the ongoing qualitative improvement of Google Earth and its huge client base, exceeding, according to some estimates, already a quarter of a billion users, indicate that the Microsoft developers ’task of“ catching up and overtaking Google Earth ”is more difficult than ever.”

    Interestingly, not only Microsoft is closely monitoring the actions of its competitor, but Google is also trying to take over the strengths of the Virtual Earth project. So, despite its leadership in the map market, Google Earth is inferior to Microsoft in terms of 3D. In order to eliminate the shortage of its service, the Internet giant relatively recently acquired a license for three-dimensional map technology from Stanford University.

    CNews

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