Virtual Earth

I've been down in Tampa, FL for the annual ASPRS (American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing) meeting. For several years I have been co-instructor of a one day workshop on hyperspectral remote sensing and GIS feature extraction. I was around for the first part of the formal conference today and one of the keynote speakers was from Microsoft's "Virtual Earth" project. It is a pretty ambitious project. They are collecting 15 cm / pixel multispectral (I presume just three or four band) data over major cities and doing photogrammetry to get topography and also doing "drive-by" imaging for ground scale views. The goal is to have kind of a mix between Google's Google Earth and mapquest where you can zoom into a city and get a 3-D model of the city... pretty amazing stuff.