Did you ever wanted to be able to have a bird’s eye view of an area? Now you can!, when simply using Microsoft’s bird eye view available from Live Maps. The quality of the images is pretty detailed and you (currently) have a four-angle view at your disposal. Isn’t that just cool?

Kasteel Rozendaal, VELP GLD, Netherlands

The technique behind this is from a company called Pictometry International. The images are taken at a 40 degree angle from low-flying airplanes and each spot in the picture is overlapped in as many as 12 to 30 images of the same location. Luckily, storage space gets cheaper every day, but still.

So, it’s not that Microsoft gets the credits for this, but at least they are making it publicly available to the common people, and not only limiting this data to the IRS’es and CTU’s, for which i am grateful.

However, as an inhabitant of the Netherlands and a frequent visitor of the Veluwe, i wonder how far the Dutch (and European governments in general) are with technique’s like these, because, for example i believe they cannot yet handle emergency calls in which you give your location by a GPS coordinate, or am i wrong about that?

So while Google is busy mapping streets with their StreetView project, the team behind Microsoft Live Maps did something cool as well. Though they still have a lot of area’s to cover, it will sooner or later be the future of our maps, available anyplace, anywhere and anytime.
I wonder how long will it take before we have near-live “pictometry-images”. It will happen, but the question is when. 2020? 2030? or maybe as fast as 2015? The least i hope is that I’ll still be here to be excited about it.