MapForums

The Virtual Earth Public Sector team was in Redmond, WA this week at the Microsoft Army Symposium where Army leaders and Army IT subject matter experts have gathered to discuss many of the IT issues of moving to a Modular Force while maintaining support for our soldiers in combat. At the Virtual Earth exhibit we were showing Virtual Earth based 2D mapping solutions for command and control and the 3D environment for training and simulation. Adjacent to the Virtual Earth team was the Microsoft ESP team, responsible for the flight simulation platform technology that allows organizations to create their own simulation programs for land or air, and are now beginning to leverage (at least in demos) the highly accurate and real Virtual Earth 3D city models. Readers of this blog may remember an entry about this following the joint appearance of the two Microsoft groups at last year's I/ITSEC conference.

Readers of this blog also know that I always strive to share a story from the events we participate at and I heard a good one at this symposium. A gentleman from the US Army Garrison Redstone who was a pilot in Vietnam and still flies privately shared his appreciation for Virtual Earth for simulating landings at regional airports. He explained that he always checks weather conditions the night before and based on the prevailing winds, he can make reasonable estimates as to which runaways Air Traffic control will assign for landing the next day (given that airplanes take off and land into wind). With this in mind, he will examine those runaways on Virtual Earth that evening before he actually flies the next day.

Said this gentleman, "When I pop out of those clouds and spot my runaway I have this sense of already having been there from having explored in Virtual Earth. It provides a great deal of confidence."

Great testimony. Thanks Larry!

I should also mention that we also showed a Border Patrol demo that is a great example of the Virtual Earth platform being used for viewing the Big Picture and then drilling down on particular points of interest for detailed information.

In the screenshot below, you can see the points of entry at the US/Mexico border. When we mouse over the far left point, the application returns data. letting us know that it is the San Ysidro point of entry. When we click on it, the application automatically zooms down to the view you see in the next screenshot.

This zoomed in aerial image, while not live, gives a good idea of the volume of traffic the border sees and the challenges to monitor and patrol. When we mouse over Lane 6 we get detailed information as seen in the right pane. This includes how many vehicles have passed through this particular lane in the last hour and the license plate captured for the last vehicle to pass.

If we want live views, the Virtual Earth application program interfaces (APIs) allow for the integration of third party data into applications including web cams and live streaming video. In this demo, we can click on the web cam icon and see the view from that camera angle at the lane six point of entry. Our details pane gives us the web cam view and tells us that there is a 27 minute wait time. We can also pull in live weather from another data source (in this case, AccuWeather.com).

As you might imagine, this demo which shows the power and flexibility of the Virtual Earth platform for location visualization and monitoring, was well received at this year's Army symposium.*

See Original Post...