They explained this in their first Q&A in August. Whether you can see the underwater imagery depends on the depth of the water. If it’s shallow, you can see the bottom (i.e. the Bing Maps imagery below). if it’s deep, you only see the water textures. The problem is that Bing‘s underwater imagery is rubbish in many places. In order to hide this, they had to lower the underwater terrain relatively close to the water‘s edge so we can only see water and not the ugly imagery. They did this globally, I guess by use of an algorithm. The downside is that this way not only the ugly imagery is hidden but also the nice parts. In order to show the nice imagery, they have to manually exclude these areas from this „terrain lowering“ so that we can see the imagery below. Since they have to do this manually, it takes a lot of time.
For their promo videos they probably deactivated the global terrain lowering so that we can see all those beautiful shallow waters. What we see in the videos is the „raw version“ so to speak, in which water bodies look exactly like in Bing Maps, with all its flaws. They obviously only show places that look good. They don‘t withhold those beautiful places from us, they‘re just not done yet. That‘s at least how I understood it.
I hope this makes sense. Not that easy to explain this in a foreign language😅
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