I just noticed the new getmapping software that lets you fly over Britain. It was costing £24 ish quid for for the starter set going upto £600 to allow the whole of Britain (or is it just England & Wales?) to be viewed in 3D.
But, this software already exists. Alright it's not a single package, but it can be done for a lot cheaper.
Enter visual flight: www.visualflight.co.uk For £100 you have photographic scenery overlaid onto 3D terrain for Microsoft's Flight Simulator products. This covers the whole of England and Wales (not Scotland).
Whilst these two products may seem the same they are actually chalk and cheese! The Visual Flight product requires Microsoft Flight Simulator so it means you have to fly a plane to see the scenery. The Photoscape 3D product is much higher resolution and has easy to use controls built in. Stopping mid flight for a vertical view does not cause the plane to stall or crash!
I have tried both and was blown away by Photoscape 3D and await the full review with interest.
The key factors to consider with digital aerial photography are resolution and file size. It's similar to your decision to use 50K O/S or 25K O/S or even 10K paper maps. It's a trade off between detail and area covered. How much detail do you want or expect? There are a lot of 3D products coming on the market now that use relatively low resolution data around the 4 metre pixel range (183kb in jpg format for a 1km square) which you may find adequate. Photoscape uses 2m pixels (732kb) which is 4 times greater resolution. Mistyhill Terravisual gives you the ultimate 0.5m pixel(11.4 MB) and the main data suppliers such as Getmapping provide the commercial market with 0.125 m for selected areas. As one would expect, you get what you pay for. Go check out the raw data costs and see what a great deal you're really getting from all of these products.
Well said Mike! Of course a lot depends on the use you want to make of the software too. For the majority of walkers the photomaps are only usable on a PC - and I've yet to see a walker carrying a laptop into the mountains! There's not really much point going beyound the phot capabilities of MemoryMap or Anquet for the majority of users as these are about the limit of what you can fit on most affordable memory cards - that's if you you use a handheld (e.g. iPaq/Palm)that's portable enough to be taken into the hills.
Higher resolution software such as MistyHill are superb, but their practical use is very limited for the average walker. They're great for more commercial purposes such as planning etc, but we'll have to wait a while till high capacity memory cards drop in price enough to even consider taking them on a walk.Beyond presentation purposes for long trips what are you going to do with them?
I've got a reputatiopn for using gadgets in the mountains, but even I rarely take any aerial maps with me, except for demonstration purposes (eg Buttermere Meet).
Hi Dave. We have quite different outlooks, but as you say the higher res' big files are not suitable to take outdoors, however it may happen as technology develops. It fills a different niche. It's purpose is planning, browsing, familiarising, and reminiscing in comfort and safety (laptop in pub). Yep, I'm aging. There will come a time when I only use virtual reality to explore the high ridges and deep gorges, and I need high res' for that. Also I spent twelve years taking students and equipment into the great outdoors. Consequently I developed a profound predjudice for anything that required a battery. Although I do use GPS and it is very useful to mark and revisit paths, well routes, in wilderness areas.
