Virtual Earth

From World Wind Wiki

Virtual Earth plug-in
Virtual Earth Aerial view of London (image Copyright Microsoft Corporation)
Developer	Casey Chesnut/Patrick Murris/What_nick
Latest release	1.4 / 2007-01-08
License	undefined
Web site	Plug-in website

1 Virtual Earth

[edit] Virtual Earth

The Virtual Earth plug-in gives World Wind users the ability to view imagery from Microsoft's local.live.com website.

Please note this imagery is owned by Microsoft (MSFT) and may only be used for non-commercial purposes. Any other use must be coordinated with the Microsoft Virtual Earth team. All imagery obtained using this plug-in is copyrighted and may not be redistributed in any form.

This Virtual Earth data access to NASA World Wind users is made possible through the gracious generosity of Microsoft and the beautiful coding efforts of Casey Chesnut.

[edit] Loading and using the plug-in

To load the plug-in click 'Load/Unload...' in the Plug-Ins menu (see figure 1). Then from the dialog box click 'Virtual Earth Plugin' (you may have to scroll down a bit), and press the 'Load' button (see figure 2), the indicator next to 'Virtual Earth Plugin' should now change to green, now close the dialog box.

figure 1 - Plug-Ins -> Load/Unload...

figure 2 - Plug-In Load/Unload dialog box

To Change the options in the plug-in click the toolbar icon (see figure 3), a dialog box with several options is then displayed (see figure 4). From the dialog box you can turn the imagery on or off with the 'Layer On' tick box, select which type of imagery you would like to view, Road (Maps), Aerial (photographic type imagery) or Hybrid (a mixture of both), you can also press 'Locate Me' button to have World Wind move the globe to your current location (this is very approximate and may be wrong by several miles), pressing the 'Open in live.local.com' will cause your web browser to open the location you are currently viewing in Microsoft's local.live.com. The 'starting zoom level' slider controls when Microsoft imagery starts to show in World Wind, a lower number causes imagery to load at a higher altitude (when you are zoomed further out).