Exploring Bing Maps
April 15, 2010
This week we're going to explore Bing Maps so open your browser at www.bing.com/maps/explore. Firstly check up at the top right of the browser window that your locations is set as United States. If not, you need to open www.bing.com, click the country at the to right (most likely you'll have Australia) and choose United States - English from the list on the page.
Open Bing Maps explore at www.bing.com/maps/explore and you'll probably see the map open on Melbourne. Depending on how the map centres itself, in the left pane you've already got some information about a map location (Armidale, a Melbourne suburb, in the screenshot).
Pan the map northwards towards Shepparton (hold the left mouse button down and drag the map) and as you do so you'll see the information in the left pane change. Once you get Shepparton showing in the left pane (as shown in the screenshot), there's lots of information available from the left pane. Yes, there's the current temperature, and alongside it is an icon that links to a 3D view of the Murchison meteorite (more on that later) and some photos of the local area.
Rather than panning the map around, we can also enter a specific location in the search box - let's go to Rushworth. There's a brief description of the town with a link to a more descriptive article and below that an icon that represents a 3D view of the multipurpose room at Rushworth Community House and then links to photos of the local area that Bing Photos Search has found.
Let's travel over to Murchison (you'll need to enter the state and country to get there since there are several Murchisons worldwide). Hover over that thumbnail image of the Murchison meteorite in the left-hand pane to see that it was created by jbmurchsynth and consists of 48 photos. Click and the photosynth will open in the right-hand pane. You can spend some time rotating the meteorite and zooming in. However, jbmurchsynth has an updated 3D view - it's the one in the left-hand pane with the red background so take the opportunity to view the meteorite in greater detail.
Note driving directions are available and a closer inspection of the left pane will reveal you can obtain walking directions as well. Just remember you drag and drop markers onto the map to set your originating and final destinations and you drag the route itself to make changes to suit your own needs.
You can explore lots of information about other locations around the world but the real exploring power of Bing Maps is in separate applications, called the Map Apps, that provide specific information, such as the location of Photosynth 3D views, so let's see what's available.
Bing Map Apps
You'll find the Map Apps button down in the bottom right-hand corner of the left-pane; click it to bring up the full list of Map Apps.
Now some of these we've already explored - Streetside Photos and WorldWide Telescope - and today we've already seen how to view Photosynths. As an aside, it's worth re-visiting Streetside Photos since this app draws on photos added to Flickr and people are always adding new ones so you'll see new views of buildings when you're walking around different locations.
In WorldWide Telescope, here's a little hint: you can change the date and time of the sky view by dragging your mouse across the year, date and/or time shown in the box at the bottom left of the sky view pane. Oh, and did you know that the sky view is displayed in real time (if you're internet connection is fast enough) so you should see objects move as time goes on.
The first Map App to look at is the Bing Maps World Tour which gives you an overview of new imagery that is added to Bing Maps each month. Once in the tour, you can narrow your view to specific locations. For example, imagery of Canberra was updated last month so you can now see how Canberra has changed as a result of the 2003 bushfires.
Another app to try is Travel webcams - choose Sydney from the list and watch all that traffic chugging across the Sydney Harbour Bridge during peak hour (and just about at any other time of day).
Keep on exploring
There's plenty in Bing Maps to keep you occupied. Of course, Bing Maps is always there to help you with practical needs such as finding driving or walking directions. As well remember that you can print out travel directions and in many cases you can save your settings for future use.