Being a Google apps user by default, I doubted that any new online maps service would grab my attention. This was till Microsoft Live Maps came and I heard news about the deal they made with the Portuguese Geographic Institute, which gave them (and to Google) high-defenition images of the whole country.
The difference is just astonishing. It really made me wish Google was a bit faster in updating the now old-fashioned images of Portugal that it has. But what really made me play around with Live Maps was their new feature "Bird's Eye", which displays images with a slight inclination and with the possibility of rotation for seeing from another angle. Sure Google has street view, eye alt, 3D view and all that stuff, but hardly any of those is really helpful. The first will take a crazy amount of time for being available worldwide, and even by that time, it still will display a pretty useless view of the streets. The second, eye alt, I don't even know what is supposed to be, since is just a option for seeing worse what you already have. It might make more sense in 3D view, but even that, in my opinion, had a bad approach by rendering computer-made images of the buildings as a supposed real view of the planet. If I wanted a maps system which was like a CoD4 map I would ask.
With Bird's Eye Microsoft made it simple and stupid, but it's far better than any of the existent alternatives.
The difference is just astonishing. It really made me wish Google was a bit faster in updating the now old-fashioned images of Portugal that it has. But what really made me play around with Live Maps was their new feature "Bird's Eye", which displays images with a slight inclination and with the possibility of rotation for seeing from another angle. Sure Google has street view, eye alt, 3D view and all that stuff, but hardly any of those is really helpful. The first will take a crazy amount of time for being available worldwide, and even by that time, it still will display a pretty useless view of the streets. The second, eye alt, I don't even know what is supposed to be, since is just a option for seeing worse what you already have. It might make more sense in 3D view, but even that, in my opinion, had a bad approach by rendering computer-made images of the buildings as a supposed real view of the planet. If I wanted a maps system which was like a CoD4 map I would ask.
With Bird's Eye Microsoft made it simple and stupid, but it's far better than any of the existent alternatives.