What I want to talk to you about today is virtual
worlds, digital globes, the 3-D Web, the Metaverse.
What daes this all mean for us? What it means is the
Web is going to become an exciting place again.
It's going to become super exciting as we transform to
this highly immersive and interactive world.
With graphics, computing power, low latencies, these
types of applycations and possibilities are going to
stream rich data into your lives. So the Virtual Earth
initiative, and other types of these initiatives, are
all about extending our current search metaphor.
When you think about it, we're so constrained by
browsing the Web, remembering URLs, saving favorites.
As we move to search, we rely on the relevance rankings
the Web matching, the index crawling. But we want to
use our brain! We want go navigate, explore, discover
information. In order to do that, we have to put you as
a user back in the driver's seat. We need cooperation
between you and the computing network and the computer.
So what better way to put you back in the driver's seat
than to put you in the real world that you interact in
every day? Why not leverage the learnings that you've
been learning your entire life? So Virtual Earth is
about starting off creating the first digital repre-
sentation, comprehensive, of the entire world. What
we want to do is mix in all types of data. Tag it.
Attribute it. Metadata. Get the community to add local
depth, global perspective, local knowlegge. So when you
think about this problem, what an enormous undertaking.
Where do you begin? Well, we collect data from sate-
llites, from airplanes, from ground vehicles, from
people. This process is an engineering problem, a me-
chanical problem, a logistical problem. Here is an exam
ple of our aerial camera. This is panchromatic. It's ac
tually four color cones. In addition, it's multi-
spectral. We collect four gigabits persecond of data,
if you can imagine that kind of data stream coming
down. That's equivalent to a constellation of 12 satel-
lites at highest res capacity. We fly these airplanes
at 5000 feet in the air. You can see the camera on the
front. We collect multiple viewpoints, vantage points,
angles, textures. We bring all that data back in. We
sit here--you know, think about the ground vehicles,
the human scale--what do you see in person? We need to
capture that up close to establish that what it's like
type experience. I bet many of you have seen the Apple
commercials, kind of poking at the PC for their
brilliance and simplicity.