Keith Kinnan's Blog : MapCruncher

Live Search Maps Update!

keithkin — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 08:52:47 GMT

We just released an updated version of Live Search Maps built on the Virtual Earth platform. It is difficult to list all the new features, but here are some of the new features:

Birdseye Imagery with Labels - Birdseye imagery now supports Road Labels showing roads and names on the birdseye scene similar to Aerial map style. The navigation control was improved with a Labels toggle which now works in Aerial and Birdseye modes -- so you can turn the Labels on and off.
Improved 3D Experience - Improved 3D models and detailed textures including trees in cities. Initially this is in Las Vegas, Phoenix, Denver, and Dallas but will be expanding to more cities in the future. Improved 3DVIA Modelling
Improved Collections - Export collections to KML, GeoRSS, or GPX format. Add a MapCruncher custom tile layers to your collection and view them in Live Search Maps. Previously this was only available for API users.Collections Explorer filtering - you can now filter your collection searches by tags . Subscribe to neighborhood region RSS feed
Improved Directions and Traffic- Directions now uses MSR Clear Flow technology for enhanced traffic-based routing. Also added localized itineraries for certain locales.
Improved One-Click Directions - One-Click directions map is now interactive. Reverse geocoding is now supported so the address will be displayed when you right-click on the map and ask for 1-click Directions.
Enhanced Tour Support - Improved movie resolution support, speed control, and added photo support to movies
Improved Browser Support - Added Safari 3 and IE8 Beta Support
v6.1 Virtual Earth API - Reverse compatible with v6 and adds enhancements. I'll post more details about this in a future post.

For more details on the new Live Search Maps update, check out this post at the Virtual Earth Spaces Blog

Microsoft Research Releases Tiled Vectors Demo

keithkin — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 01:57:00 GMT

Microsoft Research released a Tiled Vectors Demo which is available for download. The demo shows a way to solve the problem of showing extremely large mapping data sets in the web browser. If you have used the Virtual Earth AJAX/JavaScript Map Control or other web-based mapping controls or any web application with a large number of DOM elements/SVG/VML graphics, then you probably have seen that loading extremely large data sets (with thousands of points, lines, and polygons) can bring the browser to a crawl because of limitations in the browser DOM.

The Tiled Vectors Demo from MSR attempts to solve this problem by breaking up the shapepoints into constant-sized sets, similar to how MapCruncher breaks up images into image tiles. Since the data is broken into constant-sized sets, the original data set can be arbitrarily large -- so the solution scales really well to extremely large data sets. Regardless of which level of detail you are viewing the map from, the amount of data the map loads is always constant. This significantly improves performance. The vector data is still loaded using Virtual Earth VEShapeLayers in JavaScript -- so the shapes are still interactive and can be controlled from client code and respond to events.

You can see a demo page here:

Tiled Vectors Demo

For more detailed information regarding the Tiled Vectors approach and how you can apply it to your data sets, see:

Tiled Vectors Demo Information

MapCruncher Beta for Virtual Earth Now Available

keithkin — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 19:47:00 GMT

MapCruncher for Virtual Earth has just been officially released as a Beta release for Virtual Earth! Previously, MapCruncher was a project from Microsoft Research - MSR MapCruncher.

MapCruncher allows you to easily create custom image tiles to overlay in Virtual Earth mashup applications. The custom image tiles can anything you want to overlay on Virtual Earth imagery - for example, your own aerial imagery, parcel boundaries, neighborhood maps, trails, routes, etc. Here's the official description from the Beta download page:

MapCruncher Beta for Microsoft Virtual Earth makes it easy to publish maps overlaid in an application using the Virtual Earth map control. Once you are familiar with the tool, it will take you about ten minutes to generate a new tile layer. Just find 5 to 10 corresponding landmarks on your map and on the Virtual Earth map view, and MapCruncher will register your map to the global coordinate system, warp it to fit a Mercator projection, and generate a set of image tiles that can be seamlessly layered on top of Virtual Earth map control's standard road, hybrid, or aerial imagery. It even makes a sample HTML page for reference.
MapCruncher accepts a variety of vector formats (PDF, WMF, EMF) and raster formats (JPG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, BMP).

Here's an example Virtual Earth Mashup using tile layers generated from MapCruncher from a previous post:

Virtual Earth API: Using Tile Layers

Virtual Earth API: Using Tile Layers

keithkin — Tue, 01 May 2007 22:23:00 GMT

In the v3 version of the Virtual Earth API, we added support for custom Tile Layers, which allows you to add your own custom imagery and overlays on the map.

One of our developers, Jaya Bhatia blogged about Tile Layers with the v3 Virtual Earth API awhile back. In the v5 Virtual Earth API, we have now simplified working with custom Tile Layers.

To create custom tiles for Virtual Earth, you can use MSR MapCruncher. Check out the step by step tutorial and a 5 minute demo video of how to use MSR MapCruncher to generate tiles.

Once you have generated your tiles and hosted them somewhere, you are ready to create a v5 Virtual Earth API mashup with your tile layer.

For this example, I am using the tiles Jaya generated for her original example from a Seattle Metro Transit System Map.

To load your custom tiles in the Virtual Earth v5 API, you first need to create a VETileSourceSpecification with a string ID and a URL to your custom layer.

var tileSource = new VETileSourceSpecification("SeattleTransit", "http://jbhatia1.members.winisp.net/SeattleTransit/%4.png");

The URL to the tile source can have special characters which will be substituted when tiles are loaded. '%4' is used to substitute the tile name using the Virtual Earth naming convention. MSR Map Cruncher generates tiles using the Virtual Earth naming convention, so we can use '%4' as a placeholder for the the name of the tile files.

You can then set other optional properties for the tile layer on your VETileSourceSpecification object:

tileSource.Bounds = [new VELatLongRectangle(new VELatLong(49,-123),new VELatLong(47,-121))];
tileSource.MinZoomLevel = 2;
tileSource.MaxZoomLevel = 16;
tileSource.Opacity = 0.6;
tileSource.ZIndex = 100;

In the above sample, I set the Bounds property which is an array of VELatLongRectangles which specify the coverage area of your tile layer. The MinZoomLevel and MaxZoomLevel properties specify the zoom level ranges where your tiles exist. Using the Bounds, MinZoomLevel, and MaxZoomLevel can be used to restrict where your tile layer is displayed and also improves performance because it will prevent unnecessary attempts to load tiles where they do not exist.

The Opacity property allows you to specify the transparency of the tile layer. The value can range from 0 to 1, where 0 is completely transparent and 1 is opaque.

The ZIndex property allows you to specify the z-index for the tiles in the tile layer and allows you to control which tile layers appear over other tile layers.

Once you have finished creating the VETileSourceSpecification, you can call AddTileLayer on the VEMap to add your tiles to the map. The second parameter indicates whether or not to immediately show the tile layer. In this case, it is set to true so the tile layer will be immediately visible.

map.AddTileLayer(tileSource, true);

Here is a link to the complete working example:

Virtual Earth API Tile Layer Sample

For more information regarding the Virtual Earth APIs, see the Virtual Earth Interactive SDK.