Slashgeo

Any Geo reports : "Leica Geosystems Geospatial Imaging has just announced the Beta Release of ER Viewer 7.2. Recall, ER Viewer is a free, easy-to-use image viewer featuring interactive roaming and zooming of very large JPEG 2000 and ECW files, as well as the ability to read most other common file types.

The Beta release of ER Viewer 7.2 includes the following new features:
- Support for Microsoft Vista
-ECWP application protocol: With this new protocol, users may open an ECWP URL in ER Viewer from links in Microsoft Word or Internet Explorer."

For more information and the download link, visit the AnyGeo.

We warned our readers about some geonews being published at a slower rate than usual but claimed that you won't miss anything major. Here's Microsoft geonews wrap-up for February. Let's start with the big data update announced this week with new birds eye and 3D cities in Virtual Earth, including significant additions in Portugal, Italy, and Austria. There was also a data update in January detailed here. Here's more on the upcoming World Wide Telescope (WWT), dubbed by many as Microsoft's answer to Google Sky (previously this month). Here's a demonstration of the video recording function over new VE 3D buildings in Paris. Here's a video including Jack Dangermond on the ESRI-Microsoft partnership. There's also two important customers migrating to the Virtual Earth platform: YellowBook and Windermere. There's also a way to show Google My Maps data in Virtual Earth (via OE). APB links to an analysis of the local component of the possible Microsoft-Yahoo! merger. Several other Microsoft-related geonews were shared recently.

Slashdot has all the information about this. This is most follow up to the Google Sky product MSFT was working on. There is a pretty good video demonstration, so please visit slashdot to get the link and discussion items.

Update : I just noticed Ogle Earth has a great review of the whole thing. Please visit their page for a highly detailed overview.
Update : The Google Earth Blog has also done an extensive review of this. Check out their page for more information.

Here is their summary : "Ted.com has a great sneak peek at Microsoft's new WorldWide Telescope project. In this video, presented by Roy Gould and Curtis Wong, you are able to see a combined view of satellites and telescopes from all over the planet and nearby space. The compiled image is rendered using Microsoft's new high-performance "Visual Experience Engine" that allows users to pan and zoom across the night sky seamlessly."

From the GIS in XML blog : "One of the many announcements at the MIX08 conference is the availability of Deep Zoom technology for Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1. This results from an R&D program in Microsoft called Sea Dragon. Sea Dragon was evidently a Microsoft acquisition awhile back. Reminiscent of Keyhole(now google earth), Sea Dragon is a tool for smooth viewing of very large image resources. The novelty is to have it useable inside a SilverLight browser view."

For links to a live demonstration of Silverlight and more info on the Blue Marble project, visit the GIS in XML blog.