Fly through Tampa at your desk
Competing computer mapping programs vie for market share.
By JAY CRIDLIN
Published June 1, 2007
The battle for Tampa, Miami and the rest of the Earth is officially under way.
For a while Google held the lead with a mapping program, Google Earth, that allows users to see a satellite image of just about any address in the country.
Then Microsoft unveiled its Virtual Earth software, offering higher-resolution "bird's-eye views" of many major cities, including Tampa. With Virtual Earth, you can see many places from four angled points of view, not just one.
Then this week both sides fired salvos claiming Earth as their own -- and Tampa and Miami were among the cities hit.
Microsoft rolled out Live Search Maps (maps.live.com), a program offering interactive, photorealistic 3-D tours of nine North American cities, including Tampa. With Live Search Maps, you can zoom between Tampa's skyscrapers for an upclose look at landmarks like churches, the Tampa Museum of Art and the minarets of the University of Tampa.
Then Google unveiled Street View (maps.google.com), a new map feature granting users mind-boggling detailed glimpses of streets in certain cities, including Miami, as viewed from eye level. You can read street signs, license plates and make out expressions on the faces of pedestrians.
Are the programs fun to try out? You bet.
Are they useful? Eh. Maybe.
Do they probe a little too deeply into the world as we know it? Now there's a question.
Detailed to a fault?
Microsoft's Virtual Earth is a marvelous time waster. Look there, along the Hillsborough River -- it's graffiti left by Ivy League crew teams! And down there, at MacDill Air Force Base -- you can see people putting on the golf course! The colorful views of Busch Gardens' roller coasters on Virtual Earth blow Google Earth's grainy overhead shots out of the water.
The graphics on the 3-D Live Search Maps program aren't quite as good as the Virtual Earth photos -- the program resembles an early first-person-shooter computer game -- but it's still a pretty cool program. You can make out the logo atop the Sykes building, the NBC peacock on the WFLA-Ch. 8 tower, and the Mona Lisard gecko mural on the Franklin Exchange Building.
Google Street View, on the other hand, might be a case of getting too much information. It's available so far only for Miami, New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas and Denver. Most of the astoundingly clear 360-degree photos were captured by a Canadian digital imaging company using an 11-lensed camera atop a Volkswagen Bug.
Street View is certainly an impressive piece of "how'd they do that?" But one can imagine the possibilities for cyber stalking. On Wednesday, the blog BoingBoing.net reported that a woman in San Francisco Street-Viewed her own house and found an image so detailed, she could make out her cat in the window. (The site does have a function through which users can report a street view as intrusive or inappropriate.)
Since then, CNet.com has created a gallery of offbeat Street View screen grabs, including one of a man taking out his garbage and one of two dogs fighting. BoingBoing has added links to images of license plates, a toll booth collector and a man in front of a strip club. (The term for such an ignominy, one reader suggested, should be getting "screwgled.")
Who needs them?
Here's a question about these new programs: Why would anyone need such a hyper-detailed look at the world around them? Technological curiosity? Flat-out voyeurism?
If you're traveling, you could use Street View to get a look at a restaurant's facade before you leave the hotel. And it's always fun to check out a 3-D view of the Las Vegas Strip or Times Square (where, oddly enough, you'll see an ad for Yahoo).
As for Live Search Maps, well, using it for navigation might be more trouble than it's worth. The 3-D software is free to download, but the heavy graphics require a lot of RAM and might slow down all but the hardiest of computers.
Still, soaring over the University of Tampa and cruising up Ashley Drive without leaving your desk isn't a bad way to spend a lunch break.