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Google Maps Now Displaying Buildings in 3D

In some major metro areas, Google Maps has quietly begun displaying 3D building wireframes, visible when you’ve zoomed into the more close-up street level views. Here’s the Empire State Building:

3D Google Map of Empire State Building
[Google 3D Map of Empire State Building]

The 3D building shapes are apparently adopted from Google Earth, indicating further possible convergence may be on the horizon between the related Google projects.

The building outlines or wireframes are very simplistic 3-D renderings, called “cabinet projections” by draftsmen. I haven’t done any widespread testing, but I believe they’re using a much shorter scale for the building heights than what is being used for the width and length. This is likely done to help keep the taller buildings from entirely obscuring map details that are behind the tall buildings.

Also, detail is very minimal. The Empire State Building I chose as an example is one of the better cases. Some of the more dramatic, landmark buildings in the US are very disappointing in their renderings, including the Seattle Space Needle, the Chrysler Building in NYC, the White House in Washington D.C., and the Washington Monument and the US Capital Building. I haven’t seen any cases of spheroidal shapes such as domes, for instance.

The projections are ineffective and disappointing in cases where rectangular buildings are oriented to be parallel to North/South and East/West lines, because the resultant projections don’t pop out as much — they appear too flat in those cases. [See the Sears Tower in Chicago for example.] If Google expands out map interface features to allow some rotating or tilting by users, it could address this downside.

If you recall, I’d earlier predicted that the 3D building shapes for US universities that Google is generating through their contest promotion of Sketchup could be used to to build out more detailed information intended for eventual inclusion in Google Maps. Since buildings submitted through Sketchup are adopted into Google Earth, it would appear that Google is indeed working in this direction.

Trenboxyl
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