Digital Cities of the 21th Century

Partnering with CyberCity 3D, Team Vision Virtual has released 3DHawaii.com, a comprehensive travel portal to show everything you need to know if you’re planning a trip to Hawaii. The site makes extensive use of the Google Earth Plug-in, and showcases some of the stunning 3D buildings that we’ve come to expect from CyberCity 3D.

From their press release :

Potential travelers who visit 3DHawaii.com can now explore the most comprehensive selection of hotels, resorts, restaurants, shopping centers, beaches, parks and visitor attractions available on the web, many in a 3D environment, to help them anticipate and plan their vacations and business trips to Hawaii. 3DHawaii.com introduces travelers to the many wonders Hawaii has to offer, in a captivating and engaging way. After exploring the options, travelers can make reservations using links on the site. Travelers will find aggressive rates for both lodging and activities. For hotels, travelers book directly with the property. For activities, travelers will book through MC&A, Team Vision Virtual’s local wholesale partner.

“Hawaii’s legendary landscapes come to life for travelers at 3DHawaii.com. We have invested in and published hundreds of high quality 3D buildings on Google Earth, which is going to drive a substantial amount of new web visitor traffic to our destination and our partners,” said Craig Carapelho, CEO, Team Vision Virtual. Hotels, activities, shopping centers, historic landmarks and other venues featured will help solidify the decision-making process for prospective visitors, allowing them to actually ‘experience’ all of our state’s destinations in 3D. It’s the next best thing to actually being here. For hotels and venues that choose to participate in 3D Hawaii, they now have a new way of showcasing their property and an additional connection to the booking process.”

in3d.com is a company that you may not have heard of, but with the kind of work they’ve just released you’ll certainly be hearing more about them. in3d is a geosocial media development company that works with a variety of clients in northern California, including wineries, businesses and towns. Their site won’t be going live for a few weeks, but you can already see some of their remarkable work in the video below, which showcases the Napa Valley region:

So far they have built around 40 locations in the region, and all of these buildings can be found in Google Earth. However, they don’t have a KML to help you view them all easily. That would be a nice touch, and I would imagine that it (or something similar) will be available when their site launches later this summer. 3D development is a rapidly growing field, as we showed you last week. This kind of competition is good for everyone, as it will result in more high quality models for all of us to enjoy.

Have a look at their features page.

Many people out there would like to get their home or business modeled in 3D for Google Earth, but don’t have the time or expertise to use Google SketchUp to do it themselves. Over time, Building Maker may provide a good way to do it, but right now it only covers a tiny fraction of the earth and the models tend to be lower quality than hand-designed buildings. What do you do in the meantime?

We talked last year about a few options. Concept3D and CyberCity3D both have packages available, and both do excellent work. The only problem is the pricing; Concept3D starts at $325, and CyberCity is likely in the same area (though they don’t list prices). They’re certainly worth the price, but what if you just want a simple model ?

Estate3D is a new service that will model your home or business for just $99. They’ll supply you with the resulting KMZ file and they’ll submit it to Google for you so that it’ll appear in Google Earth in the main “3D Buildings” layer. For $99, they’ll do a single building that’s composed of 50 faces or less; more than enough for most individual buildings. You simply take photos of your building, upload them through their site and give them a few days to turn it around. I had them do my house so I could see how the process worked. It’s a simple model, but they did a nice job with it. Along with the basic house, they added things like the front porch, back deck and the chimney.

They also provide you with an embed code so you can show the building off on your own website via the Google Earth API. This means users of your website will be able to navigate around the model in 3D, right in their web browser. The embedded result works like the examples on their portfolio page : If you have a model that you need done, we highly recommend you check them out.

3D cities are coming to the iPad, but it won’t be from Google (at least not yet) A French company called Newscape has been demoing their Mobile 3D City software for the iPad, and it looks very slick. Here’s a brief video of the software in action:

As ReadWriteWeb says, it’s certainly not as full-featured Google Earth. For one thing, it’s only a single city at a time (starting with Paris). The other shortcoming is the size of the visible area. You’ll notice in the demo that it shows a small block of land with black space all around. I assume this is to keep things running smoothly, which it certainly does. Another neat thing is that their 3D city technology works on the iPhone as well. In fact, their “Paris 3D” app is available for download now for a cost of $3.99 (iTunes link). Here’s a quick look at the iPhone version :

The iPhone version weighs in at a whopping 453MB, which seems to indicate that all of the data is stored in the app and not streamed over the air like Google Earth. While this helps it to load the buildings much more quickly, it’s a lot of space to consume on your phone and limits the speed with which they can update it. Is it possible that Google is working on a similar upgrade for Google Earth? While a 3D Google Earth would likely require more horsepower than this app, mobile devices are getting more powerful all the time. The iPad is an amazing machine, and Google has already shown that Android 2.2 can run apps considerably faster than the iPad as they demonstrated at Google I/O. With even more powerful phones coming out, like the Droid X and it’s dedicated GPU, it seems likely that we’ll see 3D buildings in a mobile version of Google Earth at some point. Will they arrive in 2010? It’s anyone’s guess.

Earlier this month, Google added a bunch of grey 3D buildings to a handful of cities (including Rotterdam) and now they’ve added a lot of fully-textured buildings to Rotterdam city, and it looks great ! As Google points out, over 100 of the 3D buildings in Rotterdam were created by SketchUp and Building Maker users. To see it for yourself, you can watch the video below for a brief tour, or visit Google on a screen near you.

Already in service with designers, planners and local governments around the world, CityCAD is a leading parametric modelling tool for conceptual city design. With the release of version 2.0, the full potential and flexibility of this technology is only just being realized.