Ok VE guys… I keep asking this almost every single update… can we please get some better stuff of Pennsylvania? (Birds eye views of the middle of nowhere??) ;~)  But anyway, I have been browsing the latest VE update and the new and updated imagery is looking quite nice.

And of course, you can view the new ortho imagery in WorldWind and WWJava with the additional plug-in or code.

WorldWind forum member Omega has been busy working on the Virtual Earth code for WWJava and has made a nice number of improvements.  You can download the code for your own WWJava project.  He wants to do a Google Earth version… but I recomended he had better not.. since Google has a “Take but not Share” policy and I don’t want to have Google Lawyers calling Patrick about it.

Taking things into his own hands, so to speak, guil from the WorldWind forums has been working on an updated version of the Virtual Earth plug-in and has posted his results for testing.  You can download the new plug-in from here.

Fixes/Updates:

• Corrected some bugs concerning column and row wrap-around (tiles from south pole appearing in north pole, tiles with negative row or column indexes)
• Removed the need for proj 4, by encoding directly the Mercator projection and simplified some code managing the projection. It should improve slightly the performances
• Also added a transparent border/road/name layer
• Main modifications concern the optimisation of the mesh creation algorithm. I worked in radian instead of degrees to reduce angle conversions. I also changed the way it reprojects. The overhead due to Mercator reprojection is now linear in Meshpointcount instead of quadratic previously. This could significantly improve performances when using large Meshpointcount
• Fixed bug that causes crashes when downloading large numbers of tiles

Was watching CNN while at the gym today and they were making heavy use of Virtual Earth to show regions that were being affected by the severe storms in the US of late.  They used the Bird’s eye view a lot where it was available.

Now CNN use to use Google Earth a lot, and to be honest I never liked how it looked.  But their use of Virtual Earth looked a lot nice and to put it plainly, more professional looking.

I am not sure if they are using both Google Earth and Virtual Earth, or if they have just switched fully to Virtual Earth.

Don’t ask me how.. but back in December I missed something very interesting..  MS Virtual Earth was posted to work with WWJava (and I had been thinking this should be done now :} ).  You can get the Java code here and use it in your project.

I was looking at the latest updates for Virtual Earth and noticed something.

New/Updated Birds Eye Cities in the US: Butler, Pennsylvania

Ok, they spend the time and money to cover a small tow, that while it does have some nice buildings.. is really not that special (Been there many times).  Yet… larger metro areas such as Williamsport, Bloomsburg, Danville are still in old USGS Black and White.

It has been a year and a half now… how about some updating