Comparing The Super Bowl Site In Google Earth and Windows Live Maps

Cross post: This article is posted both at InsideGoogle and InsideMicrosoft.
Rob did a cool thing and compared the way Dolphin Stadium and the city of Miami are portrayed in 3D in Google Earth and Windows Live Maps. Take a look:
Dolphin Stadium:
Google Earth:

Windows Live Maps:

Miami:
Google Earth:

Windows Live Maps:

Thoughts:
Google Earth has a baseball field because the Florida Marlins play there, too. Portraying a field like that, where the actual field design changes often, is tricky at best, and a terrible idea in this case.
Google Earth’s 3D buildings are either cartoony or gray. That would work on a map view, but overlaid on satellite images, it just looks fake. Windows Live’s buildings look like photographs, because they are photographs texturing a 3D object.
Considering that Google’s is a huge, long-developed piece of software (sometimes costing money), and Windows Live’s is a browser plugin, it is amazing that Windows Live’s 3D […]

Original post by Nathan Weinberg