As an initial example I took one of my top rides in the Mt Shasta area: the climb up to Parks Creek Summit

So what will you see if the plug-in is installed?

The virtual ride starts at the intersection of Old Hwy 80 and Stewart Springs Rd. We start with a 3D map view and switch over to an aerial view. First we look towards Mt Shasta and Black Butt. Similar to photos below, we will zoom in Mt Shasta and then Black Butt.

Sometimes the Microsoft program gets stuck after the route is displayed, then it's time to reboot - just kidding, a simple or repeated hit of the reload button seems to be doing the job.

After this scenic foreplay, we will turn our view in the direction of road and follow the road up the Stewart Spring Valley The route is shown in green and generated by the Virtual Earthh route feature. Unfortunately, there seems to be no possibility add via points to a route description. So it works only for very short segments. For longer ones the the program determines the route and this is usually not the one you had in mind.

There are number of problems which I haven't mastered yet due to the amount of time I invested in this experiment and the beta status of Virtual Earth. The movements are very choppy and the loading of high resolution aerial images may not be complete before you move on to the next scene.

I stopped after a few kilometers up the road: there seems to be bug in the software which apparently made the program taking the sharp turn (route marker 1) too fast. It lost control and the view ended up in the sky, image courtesy of NASA.

I also got motion sick from the choppy movements. I cannot go on roller coasting rides and watch artsy motion pictures filmed with a hand-held camera. Now there's one more thing I can't do.