Maps.Ovi.com brings 3D to your screens and it’s beautiful

Hello everyone. Unless you were having an internet-less existence, you have most definitely seen our 3D maps. The folks at Engadget called it a ‘time sink ‘ aka, a place to play around all day. I have been playing with the 3D maps, and I would like to take you ...

Hello everyone. Unless you were having an internet-less existence, you have most definitely seen our 3D maps. The folks at Engadget called it a ‘time sink ‘ aka, a place to play around all day.

I have been playing with the 3D maps, and I would like to take you around the page as well.

First impression – I gasped out loud and clapped my hands in glee when I had my first glimpse of earth.

The Controls are nifty – zoom in/out, the right-left-top-bottom buttons to move the map around, the dot in the circle ( my personal favorite ) to change the aspect and rotate the globe, the up-down control to move up and down and the little blue man to navigate the street level and then to exit the streets. I also love how the color changes into blue when you select a particular control.

The short cuts are beautiful as well.  I love that there is a globe that I can click to take me back to the stars view from zoomed in level. The building icon takes me to the cities where we currently have 3D. In a thoughtful gesture, the maps team have also installed shout cuts to the tourist attractions for each city as well.

 

The cities where you can take a virtual walk on the streets are highlighted with the tiny dude icon next to the city name.When you hover over a city’s box, a list of shortcuts to the local attractions pop up. As I had lived and worked in Helsinki for Nokia,  I headed over to the head office to see how the 3D maps match up with the real deal.

Oh wow! So this is how the office looks from the sky! Another fact that struck me was how green and beautiful everything looked. I am pretty sure the team behind 3D maps camped out in Helsinki looking for that one perfect day to get their images.

I of course wanted to check out where I lived. In my times of living in that beautiful building, I am ashamed to say that I did not take even one good photo of it. In my defense, I was having awesome parties, dinners and coercing introducing my European friends to Bollywood movies.

Hmmm.. nice. Now thanks to street level imagery, I can take pictures of places with fancy camera angles without even visiting the place

I tried to see if I could find someone from my neighborhood in the map – then I remembered – all faces and vehicle license plates are blanked out to protect the privacy of those who happened to be in the line of sight of the cameras we employed to get the images.

However, we may have omitted blurring someone or something that you find offensive. To let us know and rectify the situation, kindly click on the top right hand corner and it will open up the Report Imagery page. Once you fill in all the boxes and click send, our developer team will be able to look into the issue and rectify it.

Now, you may find it hard to believe but 3D maps is still in Beta. This means that we are looking for your feedback and support to develop 3D maps into a great final product. So please check out your favorite cities on 3D, take a virtual walk down some beautiful streets and tell us here in the comments section your initial impressions, thoughts and ideas.

Source : http://blog.ovi.com/2011/04/19/maps-ovi-com-brings...