MSR MapCruncher for Virtual Earth

MS Research - MSR MapCruncher for Virtual Earth

"Have you ever looked at satellite photos of a building in Virtual Earth -- and wished you could zoom right in and see its floorplan? Have you ever used VE to plan a trip across town -- and wanted to seamlessly switch from its road maps to maps of bicycle trails, bus routes, or carpool lanes? Have you ever wanted to create and publish your own map mashups -- and wished you had a tool to make it easy to integrate a map you care about into Virtual Earth? Microsoft Research has made this a reality!

The Virtual Earth API allows web developers to supplement Virtual Earth’s maps with pushpins and lines. MapCruncher brings mashups to a whole new level by allowing developers to import entire maps to supplement the existing road and aerial imagery with detailed, application-specific information. The possibilities are endless: bicycle maps, transit maps, national park maps, university maps, antique city maps, or whatever scale maps you personally find interesting. See our Gallery.

 
...

MapCruncher makes it easy to publish maps overlaid on Virtual Earth. Once you get familar with the tool, it will take you about ten minutes to crunch a new map. Just find 5 to 10 corresponding landmarks on your map and on Virtual Earth, and MapCruncher will register your map to the global coordinate system, warp it to fit a Mercator projection, and generate a set of image tiles that can be seamlessly mashed up with VE’s standard road or aerial imagery. It even makes a sample HTML page to show you how to use your mashed-up map.

MapCruncher accepts both drawing formats (PDF, WMF, EMF) and image formats (JPG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, BMP).

..."

Pretty neat sounding...

Is it sad that the first thing that pops into my mind would be to overlay a funny/joke map? Such as overlaying a FPS level/map as the floorplan for the building where I work? ;)

Technorati Tags: MSR MapCruncher