Venkatarangan TNC

The camera behind Virtual Earth Birds eye view

In the recent months there has been good improvements in Virtual Earth's Birds eye view. One of the reasons this was possible was due to new camera used for these excellent high resolution images - Ultracamx. UltracamX is from a company (Vexcel) Microsoft acquired some time back. It supports very large image format available (216 megapixels: 14,430 pixels across track; 9,420 pixels along track) which means they do fewer flights to capture images. It has something like 13 CCD Arrays, each of them controlled by a dedicated CPU and instance of Windows CE Embedded and a 14th CPU for overall control.