Dude it wasnt a marekting pitch they were showing off what they were doing and what it takes to get it done

why are you looking so deep into it?

…..

yes the current 3d maps arent sexy but as you saw their at the end they know where their going with it, imagine wrapping photosynth around those ugly textured maps, and using not only their own massive imagine and video librarys but god knows eventually images from around the internet as well lol

First of all, the guy was obviously very nervous. He kept moving back and forth (dustracting) and he mixed his words up a fair bit… and talked too fast.

If we ignore that…

It read like a bloody sales pitch. Look at how incredible we are! omg!

“We were the FIRST commercial air team cleared into the Katrina space… we have 4 GB/second data stream. Imagine that! 4 GB/sec… that’s more than 5 full-time, dedicated satellites.”

Bunch of bullshit. Useless, distracting information.

If we remove that as well, we’re left with precious little. It’s basically telling people how they created the 3D imagery.

Oh – and an easy response to the line of “Hollywood spent millions to do this sort of thing, in the old days”/etc is that “Yes, but Hollywood had – and has- incredibly high quality results. You, however, have some crappy 3D textures pasted onto buildings, which doesn’t look that good.”

Honestly; I love WL Maps, and use them more than any other Mapping service, but even so.

It appears they are blending the image positioning algorithms from Photosynth into Virtual Earth so they can integrate high-resolution photo imagery (bird’s eye, street-level, maybe eventually user-generated) with the structure provided by the 3D geometry so they can provide added realism and locational awareness without having to texturemap every piece of geometry in the traditional manner.