Wondered if ay of you knew a german company called 3D Reality Maps that proposes photorealistic 3d maps.
They have a demo for one of their Alps map on Youtube

There are other demos on their map product pages (try the Alps ones).

I found this quite impressive and very detailed and wondered how difficult this would be to make it in Vue.

They use aerial photographs for the textures and thus have every color shift at the right area. They probably also use it to distribute trees or rock objects in the landscape.

The video looks very good. It seems very hard to do something equivalent in Vue, with that level of realistic detail.

Incredible is an Understatement. I could watch those Vids for days. The detail is Staggering and to be able to zoom into a mountain pool with the rock detail around it is Quite Impressive indeed!!!
Thanks for the links!!!

incredible as it might look, i dont see the problem @ all.

It would be timeconsuming, but thats all + it would cost you money to aquire the proper area data, but if you can afford it, or if you´re lucky enough to live in a place where they provide free high quality data then doing something like this is simple enough.

You´ll need some flash magic for the interface of course but that´s not a biggy either and as far as vue goes, i would say that vue is a perfect candidate for a job like this.