Overlay Your Own Customized Maps Atop of Virtual Earth

Virtual Earth is Microsoft's response to Google Earth. Both Internet services are designed as a complex combination between bird's eye, aerial, and 3D imagery on top of mapping, location, and search capabilities. The Redmond company emphasized from the debut of the mapping service the fact that Virtual Earth is built as an online platform, and in this context, third party developers are welcomed to create and integrate their own content with the product. Up to this point, the most common association between third party generated materials and Microsoft's platform involved the addition of personalized data in relation to the maps made available via Virtual Earth.

MapCruncher Beta for Microsoft Virtual Earth comes to change all this. MapCruncher is a tool that will enable users to overlay their own customized maps on top of Virtual Earth. "MapCruncher Beta for Microsoft Virtual Earth makes it easy to publish maps overlaid in an application using the Virtual Earth map control", reads a fragment of the product's overview. All that users will have to do is indicate a correspondence of five to ten landmarks on their own map and correlate them with just as many points on the Virtual Earth map.

"MapCruncher is now a supported beta product by the Virtual Earth team! This means that MapCruncher has graduated out of Microsoft Research as a pet project with really cool implications to a fully supported application by our team. If you want to overlay customize maps atop of Virtual Earth this tool will allow you to do that with a friendly user interface or programmable batch command line prompt. MapCruncher can rasterize parcel maps, community maps, bus routes, hiking trails - whatever you want so you get a robust user interface to navigate your information", stated Chris Pendleton, the Technical Evangelist for Microsoft Virtual Earth.