Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Bing's 2.5-D and Labeling options

We were looking at the Bing Maps 2.5-D building extrusiony feature available in the consumer version of their map tiles today and were poking around the parameters of the image URL to find it.  It lives in the "it" parameter, along with a few other options.  Here's what the link to a random map tile (from somewhere in Lower Manhattan) looks like...

http://ecn.dynamic.t0.tiles.virtualearth.net/comp/CompositionHandler/0320101101322013110?mkt=en-us&it=G,VE,BX,L,LA&shading=hill&n=z

Here's what the map looks like with all of the "it" values, G, VE, BX, L, and LA, turned on.

If you remove the LA value, point of interest labels go away.

Removing the L value axes street labels and equivalents.

If you remove the BX value the 2.5-D buildings collapse.  I suspect BX is short for Building Extrusions.

I don't know what the G and VE values do.

2 comments:

  1. Interesting. I would like to re-post your image as a part of my blog's content curation based on Bing Maps. It is for seo services sydney.

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    Replies
    1. Sure Peter. They're just Bing tiles so I suppose I don't have the right to give permission, but I'd be happy to see them there.

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