Looks like some cool infomation about what’s happening with Microsoft’s Virtual Earth and Windows Live Local was released at the Microsoft Virtual Earth Partner’s Day some weeks back, and what’s even cooler is that we are already starting to see some of these updates come to light, as announced on the Windows Live Maps / Virtual Earth Blog yesterday.

Thanks to the bloggers at Earthware, we know:

Support For Mac’s Safari Browser Summer 07
I know a major sticking point for some developers on the Virtual Earth forum, this should be available around June time.

Street side views
If you thought birds eye views were great this will blow you away. Microsoft are working on taking shots actually from a street point of view using a specially equipped van with 8 cameras on. They have even working with helmet mounted cameras and cyclists! The plan is to do this for some major US and European cities (apparently including major parts of London). The only problem with this at the moment is a privacy issue, you really can see people, signs, number plates etc. Believe it or not Microsoft are working on removing all these privacy issues from the imagery. You can see a proof of concept that Microsoft worked on here http://preview.local.live.com/.

Improved 3d Model Textures
Those of you who have seen the 3d models (especially in America) in Virtual Earth 3d will have noticed the textures used are not very high quality. Microsoft are working at using textures from the birds eye views to improve this. The demo they showed comparing the new and old textures was brilliant, almost photo realistic

Support for a 3d Model Community
One of the advantages Google Earth still has over virtual earth is that anyone can create and show 3d models in Google Earth, in fact Google launched a 3d Warehouse for people to submit their models. Johannes suggest Microsoft are going to emulate this possibly also bringing out a 3d tool along the lines of Sketchup. It was suggested that some access at least to adding your own 3d models will be available 4th quarter this year.

Licensing for use of imagery outside of Virtual Earth
Some of the later sessions from the marketing team also mentioned that Microsoft are negotiating with their mapping providers to come up with a licensing model for using Virtual Earth imagary outside of Virtual Earth, for example in marketing material. This is another area where Google Earth still has an edge as you commercial license agreements are available for using Google Earth imagery and video for a wide range of commercial applications.

But this is only a few of the updates, so I highly recommend you check out Earthware and the Windows Live Maps / Virtual Earth Blog.