Attaching 3D models to Google Earth has been achievable for a while. It’s interesting since to you can ‘fly’ though cities, explore spaces etc. Its adoption has been somewhat sporadic but recently the city of Berlin released around 44,000 3D building models (approx 10 percent of the city). The video below is essentially a recorded tour.
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Not sure how the buildings were designed but I suspect through using Sketchup. This effectively allows you to create models and insert them on to Google Earth.
Staying with virtual earths here’s an interesting TED talk by Stephen Lawler on the beta Virtual Earth. It streams a vast amount of rich data provided by the web community.
As an aside it’s worth noting as to how the speaker is able to pack so much information into the presentation in such a short space of time.
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In the words of Stephen the key issue here is how the user is able to use their brain, to navigate and explore, discover information as opposed to being constrained through traditional browsing via search engines, remembering urls and favorites. This could be the future look of the internet.
As a final point of interest you may not need a vast array of photos or data to create 3D navigable web objects. Photowoosh allows you to create a 3D model from a single photograph, similar to a pop up book page. Imagine the kinds of virtual projects as student can produce using this kind of software all from one image.
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