Some background on how Virtual Earth creates 3D buildings

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The Virtual Earth 3D blog has a post today

that explains in detail how they create each 3D city.  From the article:

Microsoft’s acquisition of Vexcel Corporation, a 20-year old provider of remote sensing solutions, provided the Virtual Earth team with a broad background in photogrammetry, geospatial data production, and digital elevation model (DEM) generation and refinement.  The models and their texturing are generated from aerial imagery generally captured at a 15 cm ground sample distance (GSD) by planes flying at roughly 5,500 feet over the target city and capturing a minimum of 5 views for each building (top and 4 sides). Since the Vexcel acquisition, this aerial imagery is increasingly being captured using the Vexcel UltraCAM series of high-resolution digital cameras, providing Virtual Earth’s 3D display with sub-meter accuracy.

Along with being able to generate massive numbers of models per city, they’re also able to load quickly for each user.  In fact, this is one of my favorite things about Virtual Earth.  They’ll load 3D models very quickly and very low-res, then slowly sharpen them up as you zoom in on them.

Google Earth, on the other hand, can only load full-res models.  Google’s models tend to look a little better than the ones in Virtual Earth, but the quantity and load time make VE’s cities look much better.

The full article goes into much more detail, and it’s well worth reading.

Google’s “Build Your Campus in 3D” winners announced

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As announced on the Google Lat Long blog, today Google revealed the winners of their “Build Your Campus in 3D Competition“. They are:

  • University of Minnesota – Department of Architecture
  • Purdue University – Departments of Computer Graphics Technology and Education
  • Concordia University, Loyola Campus – Department of Civil Engineering
  • Stanford University – Department of Architectural Design
  • Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW) – Departments of Engineering and Computer Science
  • Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering – Department of Engineering
  • Dartmouth College – Departments of Computer Science and Digital Art

The winners get to fly out to Mountain View in August for a 3-day visit and workshop.  Fun prize!

Even better, Google says that nearly 4,000 buildings were modeled and submitted for this contest.   That will certainly give their 3D content a boost when all of that is pushed into Google Earth.

Update to the Google Earth 3D Buildings layer

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huge_building.jpgGoogle has just pushed out their June update to the 3D buildings layer. Some cities with updates include Chicago, Christchurch (New Zealand), Karachi, Rome, Barcelona, Amsterdam and Moscow.

In addition, there is a big bug in this update. There is a building in western Turkey that looks like a normal house but is about 11 miles wide! You can view it here, but hurry — Google will likely fix it soon.

Google Earth Blog has the rest of the details about this update.

Complete 3D model of Rome, circa 320 A.D.

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This is both amazingly cool and horribly frustrating.  The Institute for the Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia has built a complete 3D model of the city of Rome

as it was in 320 A.D.  “Rome Reborn”, as it’s called, is astoundingly sharp and consists of billions of data points.  FTA:

“To create the digital model, researchers scanned a 3,000 square foot, 1/250 plaster model of the city – the “Plastico di Roma Antica” – which was completed in the 1970s. Because of the model’s intricacy – the Plastico’s Coliseum is only 8 inches tall — Italian engineers used laser radar originally designed to measure precise tolerances on jet parts to scan within a tenth of a millimeter. Each 6-by-6 section contained 60 million data points.”

As of now it has only been licensed to a tour company in Rome, but they’re in talks with Second Life to bring it there.  We can only hope that it might find its way into Google Earth or one of the other digital globes one day as well.

Want to help model a city?

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In an effort to get more cities modeled in 3D, Google has created a new category in the 3D Warehouse titled “Help Model a City“.  They’re encouraging users such as yourself to go in there and help create some of these models.  So far they have five cities listed — Ann Arbor, Michigan : Amherst, Massachusetts : Astana, Kazahstan : Brookline, Massachusetts : San Jose, California.

It seems like a good way to encourage more people to help model the buildings.  I still expect Google to create a semi-automated process to handle this (similar to how Virtual Earth does it), but in the meantime this could help get more buildings up there.

The Google Lat Long blog has more information.

Why did Google create Street View?

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The more I think about it, the more I question why Google spent so much time and money implementing “Street View”. Sure, it’s neat — but isn’t it just a temporary (and unnecessary) step?

With the advancements in 3D buildings in Google Earth (and Virtual Earth, for that matter), making your own “Street View” of any street anywhere is getting easier. For example, look at the comparison shot below in Denver:

Downtown Denver - StreetView vs. Google Earth

Street View looks a bit better if you zoom in tight, but Google Earth is very close. It simply seems to me that Google would be better served improving their 3D models rather than going off on this temporary side project.

Of course, there are three good reasons why they might have decided to make Street View, even with the objections I have.

1 – Good press.

It’s not a big news story to say “the 3D models in Denver are now a little bit sharper than they were before”, but Street View has generated a ton of news hype (and therefore traffic and revenue).

2 – It’s in a browser. Google Earth is a standalone client and not as easily accessible for everyone. Of course, maybe Google Earth will end up in a browser some day and that will be an irrelevant point. However, Google hasn’t indicated that at all so it might never happen.

3- Maybe they’ll be using the Street View data to map onto 3D buildings, and this is just a temporary interface into it.

What do you think? Is Street View just a temporary stop on the way to something else? Or is it the way of the future?