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Quote:Virtual Earth 3D, the online service unveiled last week by Microsoft, is both incomplete (only 15 cities are depicted in 3-D) and imperfect (some of the buildings are shrouded in shadow, and you need a powerful PC running Windows XP or the new Vista to use it). But it is also the start of something potentially big: the 3-D Web. Traditional Web pages give us text, photos and video, unattached to real-world context. Now interactive mapping programs like Google Earth let us zoom around the globe on our PCs and peer down at the topography captured by satellites and aerial photographers. Both Google Earth and Microsoft's Virtual Earth are hugely popular and have been downloaded more than 100 million times each.

With the upgraded Virtual Earth 3D, Microsoft has edged ahead of Google in at least one aspect of the race to bring immersive maps to the Net. It has added a missing piece—photorealistic buildings that sprout from the ground and evoke the lifelike but illusory world of "The Matrix." The service lets you use your mouse (or Xbox controller, if it's plugged into your PC) to navigate up, down and through America's urban jungles, and to see real-time traffic data and the occasional billboard ad. For now, it's merely a novel way to spend some time. But if Microsoft continues to add new cities and improves an already expensive project, the 3-D Web could become a carbon copy of the real world and a powerful new platform on which to blend advertising, social networks, search and e-commerce. "A seed-ling is being planted that could grow into a range of things that will be very interesting," says Internet analyst Greg Sterling. "We probably don't even understand all the implications right now." ...