Half-meter resolution image of the runway at the defunct Stapleton Airport in Denver, CO being recycled for a King Soopers distribution center from Google Maps.
All the icons that RVTrek makes available on the map contain links in their Information bubbles which can be used (when connected to the Internet) to obtain overhead images of the rest areas, weight stations, truck stops and so on. As a picture is usually worth a thousand words or more in description, these images can answer a lot of questions about their targets: are there really that many parking places available that truck stop? How exactly do I get to an off-road rest area? and so on.
Half-meter resolution image of the runway at the defunct Stapleton Airport in Denver, CO being recycled for a King Soopers distribution center from Google Maps.
The images that are commonly available are from two sources - Google Maps and Microsoft Live Search. It is important to remember that both of these sources do not do their own overhead imagery (though that may change in the future); it is bought from a series of governmental and commercial sources. The images used to be mainly taken by airplanes but more lately is derived from satellites in low earth orbit. The images are taken at a wide variety of resolutions (that is, how fine the detail is rendered), times and weather conditions. It is not surprising that many images of particular places on the two services are identical; most of the time, however, the images are different, and thus allow for a choice in images.
Best resolution images near Port Jervis, NY by Google and Microsoft.
Google Maps use the same images that are available in Google Earth, but they are displayed through your web browser rather than through specialized software. Google Maps often have lower resolution than those available from Microsoft (mainly in midwest and eastern rural areas), but where they do have higher resolution available, they usually have superior contrast and detail than Microsoft's. On the other hand, Microsoft has higher resolution in these same rural areas, though the images are often monochrome (black/white/gray). Since it is therefore difficult to choose one over the other in the general case, RVTrek allows you to select either, or even both, so you can make your own decisions.
Google Earth and Microsoft LiveView software, more specialized earth viewing software, are not directly addressed with RVTrek. However, LiveView, once installed, automatically takes the place of your browser when clicking on the MSMaps URLs. These software offerings have many nice features such as oblique views, terrain enhanced views, "street level views" and so forth.
Generally, the two services are pretty much identical in the ways their maps can be used. Both, for example, allow for using the mouse wheel to zoom in or out around the current cursor location. Both have buttons to zoom in or out based on the current center of the image (which is an important use with RVTrek, to zoom in on the resource of interest). Both have buttons to display he images "as is", or to display a map to the same scale, or to display a hybrid with the map laid over the image. Both allow the user to move the viewpoint over the map by dragging the mouse (called "panning"), and both allow the user to type in an address, and will center the map on that address if it is found ("geocoding"). Both give ample additional features, such as locating restaurants within a given area of the map center and so on.
Google's supplier of earth images, DigitalGlobe, just launched a second satellite dedicated to photographing the earth (17 September 2007). That promises that some of the lower resolution scans in Google Maps may soon be upgraded. Soon all of the US and a good part of the rest of the world will be available at 1/2 meter resolution.
You may notice that the map data used by Google Maps, MS Live Search and Microsoft Streets and Trips is often quite similar in display. That is because all three get their mapping data from Navteq.
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