Back in February I posted an entry on the acquisition of 3D modeling company, Caligari, by Microsoft. Since that time I have been waiting to share how that acquisition would play into the Virtual Earth platform story.

This week Caligari released trueSpace7.6, putting a fully-featured 3D authoring tool in the hands of anyone who wants it, at no cost! This enables you to create 3D content for Virtual Earth powered applications including Live Search Maps, for trueSpace shared spaces, for use in XNA when developing your own games, and also traditional 3D illustration and animation.

Take a look at this entry from the Virtual Earth 3D blog for a better understanding of the significance of this 3D modeling tool for Virtual Earth applications. This should be of particular interest to those of you who have asked me at various events if Virtual Earth can import other 3D models into its 3D environment.

You now have a powerful tool, at no cost, to do this.

Note the ability to create and explore building interiors and the realism that can be accomplished. I would say Virtual Earth just became an even better platform for creating training and simulation applications.