New Flights of Fancy

Microsoft found the answer in Boulder, Colo.'s Vexcel, a 21-year-old digital-imagery firm that sells a specialized digital camera to aerial photography companies. During the late '90s boom, Vexcel had a side business making 3-D recreations of urban areas for telecom firms that needed to know precisely where to position their line-of-sight antennas. Vexcel's trick: using data from its cameras, which track precisely when and where each aerial photo is snapped. The firm's software then combines the photos, accounting for overlapping features in each picture to generate a 3-D image--"taking a decimal off the price" of building the 3-D Web, says Microsoft's Lawler.

The acquisition almost didn't happen. Vexcel CEO John Curlander, a former researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was nervous that Microsoft was buying the software and would lay off many of his 135 employees. He asked for a personal meeting with Gates, and was charmed and impressed by the Microsoft founder's commitment to the 3-D vision. "That's the one thing Microsoft does have--star power," Curlander says. Microsoft didn't disclose what it paid for Vexcel, but analysts say it was north of $50 million.

Curlander and his crew now have serious work ahead. Microsoft wants to add 100 more 3-D cities to Virtual Earth by next summer. It has also hired Minnesota-based Facet Technology to drive city streets and take millions of high-resolution photographs of stores, homes and street signs. Sometime in the near future, Microsoft will begin blending those street-level images into Virtual Earth 3D, which will improve detail on the ground--and help users recognize more of their favorite restaurants and stores.

That will be cool, but it won't be cheap. Building out Virtual Earth 3D will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, analysts say, and inevitably test Microsoft's dedication to the effort. To pay at least some of the bill, Microsoft has introduced banner ads into Virtual Earth, served up by another Microsoft subsidiary, Massive, which delivers ads from major companies like Coca-Cola into videogames like Splinter Cell. Ads in the service hover over major landmarks like SBC Park in San Francisco and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (Microsoft is careful not to let the banners touch any photorealistic buildings to avoid any legal complications). For now, the ads will defray only a fraction of the cost. "Building out the entire world will be a major commitment," says geospatial-technology analyst Edward Jurkevics. "Microsoft is signing up for a very big long-term effort."

It's also buying into another footrace with search giant Google, which has the more popular and easier-to-use Google Earth. Google GM John Hanke says that giving content like photographs, weather and traffic information a geographic context by bringing them into maps is just as important as adding a third dimension. Still, Google is hedging its bet and last March bought SketchUp, a Web tool that lets users manually create textured 3-D images of homes or buildings; later this year Google plans to add the best of those images into Google Earth. Microsoft hopes Vexcel's technology can help it move more quickly into the 3-D Web than Google will with its reliance on community submissions.

Google is improving Google Earth in another way as well. This week the company will announce that it is adding 16 historic maps of six cities, including New York, London and Tokyo, from the collection of San Francisco map collector David Rumsey. Users exploring those cities in Google Earth will be able to click on a link and be transported more than 100 years into the past to a forgotten landscape. In other words, while Microsoft is stretching out in the third dimension, Google is leaping ahead into the fourth (time). Pay attention to this high-tech mapping race--it promises to take us all in some remarkable directions.

© 2006