Microsoft to help users "fly"

New York: With the launch of a new online application unveiled by Microsoft, users will be able to "fly" over cities and in between buildings just like they do in virtual-reality environments.

Known as Virtual Earth 3D, this new technology lets users view a three-dimensional map of, initially, 15 US cities when they use 'Live Search', the Newsweek said.

With the upgraded Virtual Earth 3D, Microsoft has edged ahead of Google in at least one aspect of the race to bring immersive maps to the Net.

It has added a missing piecephotorealistic buildings that sprout from the ground and evoke the lifelike but illusory world of The Matrix, it said.

For now, it's merely a novel way to spend some time. But if Microsoft continues to add new cities and improves an already expensive project, the 3-D Web could become a carbon copy of the real world and a powerful new platform on which to blend advertising, social networks, search and e-commerce, the report said.

"A seedling is being planted that could grow into a range of things that will be very interesting," Internet analyst Greg Sterling was quoted as saying. "We probably don't even understand all the implications right now."

Engineers at Microsoft understood that creating a navigable replica of the planet might give users a more intuitive way to surf and search the Internet. Need to get driving directions?

Instead of following lines and written directions on a map, Virtual Earth might, one day, take you on a run-through of your route, showing the precise landmarks where you'll make turns, the report said.

If you want to search a particular store whose name you have forgotten, you can visit that neighborhood in Virtual Earth 3D and see the actual name on the front window of the building, Newsweek explains.

"The most common-sense user model for the Internet is the real world," Microsoft general manager Stephen Lawler, who heads up the Virtual Earth project, told the magazine.

Microsoft is also opening Virtual Earth to third-party developers. So for example, one day a programmer might find a way to let users book a reservation with a mouse click right on the restaurant's front dooryard even wander inside into a 3-D simulation of the dining room to pick a table.

The biggest challenge was generating a realistic 3-D world without breaking the bank.

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 groundyand help users recognise more of their favorite restaurants and stores Google, the magazine says, 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.