This morning’s news [SearchEngineLand | Chris P Blog] that Ask.com’s maps and directions site has migrated from an application built on deCarta’s

(formerly Telcontar) mapping platform to Virtual Earth got me wondering about the future of self hosting of mapping infrastructure for high volume sites. The question isn’t if there is a future here at all, there is. In fact the Virtual Earth appliance



is offered to our customers with really specialized needs (off the grid or lots of custom pre-rendered data are a couple of good cases)  My question is how big this already niche market will become.

If your web based map app calls for supreme control and customization of cartography you historically would build your own cluster around ESRI’s universe of software and get to coding. For small to mid sized apps this was OK assuming you could make the development investment, but it broke down when scaling forced you to build out that cluster. this is where hosted solutions like Virtual Earth come in – you trade off a level of control (you don’t like our highway shields? sorry) for infinite scalability and performance.  Both are viable models for building your app and you could go with whichever worked for you. But Telcontar was offering a third option that always seemed to me to be the worst of both worlds – the limited control of hosted with all of the hosting and maintenance costs of building your own. Not everyone agrees with me of course and that’s the beauty of our free market, but i still don’t understand why someone would go this route for core maps/routes/geocoding. I’m biased as i want to see everyone building with VE of course, but if you have some insight into the deCarta model clue me in with a comment.

MVP developer Chris Pietschmann posted some nice javascript code for determining if a coordinate is in a polygon.  Chris started with code from this MSDN tutorial and focused on simplifying the polygon case. Both articles together should

give you everything you need to know for drawing shapes and testing for containment in your client code. for the full spec on drawing with Virtual Earth, steal some code from the interactive SDK.

Animators, artists, graphic designers.

there’s lots of talk today around the release of trueSpace 7.6, especially now that its price has dropped from 700 dollars to zero. Most of the talk is from mapping and GIS focused blogs, which i guess is understandable since it was the mapping division of Microsoft that became the home for Caligari after they were acquired last year. and therefore its also understandable that many of the articles try to compare trueSpace with Google Sketchup

. yes, both can export 3D models into virtual worlds (google earth and virtual earth respectively), but that is just the tip of the iceberg. its sorta like trying to compare Visual Studio to UltraEdit; Ultraedit is great for small solo projects but you wouldn’t use it to debug a remote web application.

trueSpace is an integrated application for modeling, animating and rendering with features like inverse kinematics for easy character animation, physics simulation, timeline based storyboarding, and ray traced rendering with motion blur and depth of field effects putting it in the phenomenal Lightwave’s league in the under 1000 dollar weight class. advanced features like collaborative editing in a 3d virtual world may even make users of more expensive products

  like Maya or Softimage. its usefulness goes well beyond simply adding 3d models to Virtual Earth.

Roman Ormandy created trueSpace V1 over 20 years ago and offers these insights on the latest release on his blog:

trueSpace7.6's modeling tools feature a variety of surface representations including full polygonal editing, subdivision surface modeling, NURBS, metaballs, and implicit surfaces. Those are supported by400+ modeling tools like real-time Boolean operations with full construction history so you can move subtracted parts of your design at any time during your work, or even change a subtraction to an intersection.

trueSpace 7.6 also provides advanced surfacing tools like layered materials, texture maps, normal maps, procedural materials, UVE projections, real-time DX9 pixel shaders that include shaders to simulate subsurface scattering, reflection, refraction, smoke, fire, water, anisotropicshader, metallic paint, glass – and those are just the real-time shaders!

The animation capabilities are even more impressive.trueSpace7.6 supports key-frame and motion capture animation on fully hierarchical objects. Key-frame animations can be seamlessly blended with procedural animations and physical simulations, all of which can fully interact with each other. This means you can have a walking character animated by key-frames getting hit by a procedurally animated car and fly away in response to the collision thanks to physical simulation.

…Finally, trueSpace7.6 is the only 3D authoring tool on the market which will allow you do all of the above in real-time shared 3D collaborative spaces where members of the design or animation team can maintain real-time interaction from anywhere in the world.

Download your copy now and definitely check out this

great overview of the VE relevant features on Chris’s blog