Insight into Virtual Earth - The 216 Megapixel UltraCamX

Microsoft is offering a unique perspective behind its mapping, search and location service. An integral aspect of the infrastructure that contributes content, and ultimately permits the building and evolution of Virtual Earth, is a piece of photographic equipment that Microsoft produces itself, namely UltraCamX. Mark Brown, Virtual Earth senior product manager is the author of a Channel 9 series titled "Behind The Maps," which has made it all the way to the second episode. The video fragments embedded at the bottom of this article, will offer an insight into the process using UltraCamX in order to come up with imagery for Virtual Earth.

In the first episode of the series, Brown traveled all the way to "Graz, Austria and meet Michael Gruber who invented the UltraCam aerial camera and Bernhard Reitinger who created our UltraMap software," as he revealed. Currently the main source of imagery for Virtual Earth, UltraCamX is one of just three large format digital aerial cameras in the world, according to Gruber. UltraCamX can capture 216 megapixel photographs and is capable of snapping panchromatic images of 14,430 x 9,420 pixels, at the incredible data capturing rate of 3 GBits/sec. Just to get an idea of the content that will then end up in Virtual Earth, the data units adjacent to the camera can store some 4,700 images which generally weigh in at approximately 2 TeraBytes.

The second video is shot in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with members of Keystone Aerial Surveys, and is designed to let users virtually fly with the UltraCamX. Keystone Aerial Surveys is a Microsoft partner that flies throughout the United States, and soon Mexico and Canada, in order to gather imagery for Virtual Earth with the UltraCamX.

"There is a TON of content we cover and I probably should have made this into three separate videos. But seeing as this is the internet age and everyone wants everything right now I decided to make it into one long video. It runs nearly an hour but I promise there is a ton of great information on the UltraCam and we go into deep detail on each step in how it is used to capture the high resolution aerial imagery. What you also may not realize is there is a bunch of technology that goes into the flight planning, the operation of the camera and the flight software in the air and the post-processing of the imagery. I think you’ll find this episode fascinating and I do hope you all enjoy it," Brown revealed.


Behind The Maps - UltraCam



Behind The Maps - Flying the UltraCam