14 DAY TRIAL // Leave your stakes and your silver bullets at home while visiting landmarks of the latest chapter in the Twilight saga to hit movie screens worldwide, but by all means make sure that you have Microsoft Silverlight in place. At the same time, knowing your way around Bing Maps wouldn’t hurt either. MSN Movies has released a new application, designed to permit end users to visit the most familiar locations of New Moon, from the Twilight saga. In addition to the Virtual Twilight Tour, a Cloud-based application built in Silverlight, fans of the vampire love story will be able to also access additional content, including videos and pictures. New Moon is currently set to go live worldwide on November 20th, 2009.
“The Bing team has put together The Virtual Twilight Tour, a blood-sucking fun application for you to view an exclusive Twilight video tour brings Forks, La Push, Port Angeles, and Volterra right to your computer so that you can see 16 of Twilight’s and New Moon’s most exciting locations, such as the Cullen house, Fork’s Police Station, Fork’s Hospital, Bella Italia, the dress shop, the book store, and the high school, where you can also take a virtual tour,” revealed Chris Pendleton, the Bing Maps technical evangelist for Microsoft.
On top of being able to visit Forks (population 3,175 humans and 7 vampires), visitors will be able to easily access two videos featuring members of the cast: Land of Legends and Bella’s Birthday. The MSN Twilight website also provides links to more content centered on the teenage vampire romance starring Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson.
“Just scroll over the Bing Map for location-based navigation and check out the Bing searches in the mix. There’s one part in the Twilight book where Bella looks up the word ‘vampire’ using her “favorite search engine" and then hits the bookstore in Port Angeles. Try it yourself on the virtual tour and see what happens,” Pendleton added.
The technology necessary to design similar experiences to the Virtual Twilight Tour is already available to the public from Microsoft. As users will be able to see visiting the website, the content is served through a combination of Silverlight and Bing Maps.
“The application uses Bing Maps Silverlight control not just for location context, but also because of the native integration with media elements like video and audio. In fact, the Bing Maps Silverlight control interactive SDK has samples on how to overlay scalable (and non-scalable) video feeds right into the control. So, technically, you could do this with your favorite character,” Pendleton explained.