SPIEGEL ONLINE - January 18, 2007
Hamburg Goes 3-D on Google Earth
Most cityscapes on Google Earth are flat-simple satellite photographs in two-
dimensional space. In a few cases, like New York or San Francisco, a user can
soar through a forest of blocky white skyscrapers with no detail on the facades
; only major landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge have been filled in. But
soon-in the next few days or weeks-downtown Hamburg will take a bow as Google's
first viable three-dimensional city.
"With the textured facades, Hamburg is the first city worldwide that can be
seen in such detail," Google spokesman Stefan Keuchel said in Hamburg on
Wednesday, without mentioning exactly when hundreds of buildings in Hamburg's
downtown were due to go live in 3D.The choice of Hamburg wasn't due to its
magnificent architecture so much as the efforts of Hamburg@work, a joint
initiative of the city and private business. The group approached Google with
the idea -and an offer to foot the bill-and the Internet giant, Keuchel said,
leapt at the chance.Expanding its mapping service into the third dimension is
high priority for Google. "We want to develop the ultimate virtual globe," said
Keuchel. The California-based company plans to build virtual 3D maps of most
major cities - along with a search function that will show, say, every
restaurant along a given street.The problem is that to build a database of a
city in 3D, Google needs photographs of every building, from every angle. It
plans to collect them with the help of the Internet community. Volunteers can
use a program called "Sketch-Up" to fill in the outlines of major buildings
with their own photos.The approach is fundamentally different from Google's
main rival, Microsoft, which wants to offer a similar 3D versions of cities on
its own mapping service, Virtual Earth. Instead of using uploaded photos from
users, though, Microsoft simply bought a company that specializes in gathering
such images.
Hamburg administrators provided the dimensions of the downtown buildings as
well as a trove of about 1000 aerial pictures of the city taken from an
altitude of 500 meters. Cybercity, a Swiss company specializing in virtual city
models, used them to render the building facades, which were then attached to
blank 3D objects and exported to Google Earth's special format. Uwe Jens
Neumann, the head of Hamburg@work, says "the expenses were minor" and were
split between Cybercity and the city.Hamburg isn't the first city to be
rendered in 3D. Cybercity has already created 3D versions of Paris and Florence
, and Potsdam-based Remote Sensing Solutions has rendered Berlin, Munich and
other German cities in 3D. Those cities are for sale on DVD; but Hamburg will
be the first metropolis available to anyone who has downloaded Google Earth's
free software.
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