Loving the new features in Virtual Earth

I’m preparing this morning for a keynote tomorrow at the Pisces conference in Edinburgh and I’ve had two delightful experiences.  Firstly I arrived at the new Microsoft Scotland offices in the city center of Edinburgh, which I have to say are beautiful, we are really spoiled by amazing views over Edinburgh, the park and the skyline.  I took some pics here:

Then, secondly when I was preparing my demos I came across some of the great new features in Virtual Earth.  We now have localised maps for the UK and Europe, so the road maps actually look and feel like road maps you would expect to see from the given country e.g. UK where motorways are supposed to be blue and France where they are supposed to be green. (It’s the little things :-)

Then perhaps even cooler is the weather that we’ve incorporated into 3D mode of Virtual Earth, for instance as I was flying around Las Vegas you get the view below.  This weather is based upon near realtime info (3 hours behind) but it really adds nicely to the experience!

You can find out more about the new release of Virtual Earth on Chris’s excellent VE blog here.