InsideMicrosoft

Comparing The Super Bowl Site In Google Earth and Windows Live Maps

Cross post: This article is posted both at InsideMicrosoft and InsideGoogle.

Rob did a cool thing and compared the way Dolphin Stadium and the city of Miami are portrayed in 3D in Google Earth and Windows Live Maps. Take a look:

Dolphin Stadium:

Google Earth:

Windows Live Maps:

Miami:

Google Earth:

Windows Live Maps:

Thoughts:

Google Earth has a baseball field because the Florida Marlins play there, too. Portraying a field like that, where the actual field design changes often, is tricky at best, and a terrible idea in this case.

Google Earth’s 3D buildings are either cartoony or gray. That would work on a map view, but overlaid on satellite images, it just looks fake. Windows Live’s buildings look like photographs, because they are photographs texturing a 3D object.

Considering that Google’s is a huge, long-developed piece of software (sometimes costing money), and Windows Live’s is a browser plugin, it is amazing that Windows Live’s 3D buildings look better than Google’s. This is because of a decision by both companies: Google decided to put in gray buildings and invite the SketchUp community to make them realistic. Windows Live decided to create a system that could analyze a building, create a 3D model of it, and put photos of the building on the building.

Obviously, Microsoft’s system is working better than Google’s, and Microsoft’s scales better. Microsoft will have every major building in the U.S. in 3D and texturized long before Google will.

February 8th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | General, Windows, Google, Live, Maps | 2 comments
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