Virtual Earth's Application

Virtual Earth is a geospatial mapping platform produced by Microsoft. Key features of the Virtual Earth include:

• The newest map's information and images. 

• Photo-based images with features such as 45 degree oblique "bird's eye' views that present data in context while simplifying orientation and navigation. 

• Many functions such as Zoom-in&out, Rotation of Map, etc. 

• Set of APIs available upon which developers can build applications. 

Using Visual Web Developer 2008, C#, Javascript, Ajax and Microsoft SQL Server Database, We manipulated Virtual Earth to build an application that could find local hotels within a specific distance and compare specific features of the hotels such as proximity to transportation and level of service. I am particularly proud of the fact that the application was programmed to display the comparison result in a graphical manner that is intuitive and easy to process by the user. This reflects my firm belief that the purpose of Ubiquitous Computing is ultimately to organize large amounts of data in a format ready for human processing. 

    Figure 1. The demonstration of how the applications works. 

Figure 2. A comparison chart of two hotels that a user wants to compare 

is displayed in a graphical manner that is intuitive and easy to access by the user.

This project was done by Jaeyoon Jung and Tran Quang Trung.