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.”

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.

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.

However, he added that there was no question of yielding to the Dubai company’s demands such as “free-hold” right for part of the land since they were outside the original agreement. Since the LDF Government came to power, projects worth Rs 10,000 crore have been initiated out of which Rs 2000 crore was direct government investment, he said. In the last four years, the IT sector boom in Kerala has been three times higher than the national average. The state maintained the growth trend even during the global recession, he added.

A board of directors meeting of the proposed Rs.1,500 crore Smart City Kochi concluded here Monday without taking any decision on the fate of the IT project. At the same time, the developer Smart City Dubai said it has no plans to pull out from the project. Speaking to reporters here after the meeting, Smart City Dubai chief executive Fareed Abdul Rehman said: “Some more discussions have to take place because certain issues have to be resolved. We are not asking for anything new but just want those things that have been already written in the agreement and we have not asked anything new.” He also invited the Chief Secretary of the state to visit their office in Dubai and to see what they are doing there. Smart City Dubai is sticking to the agreement where it has been mentioned that they would get 12 per cent freehold rights (around 30 acres from the 246 acres).

The Kerala government is adamant that it will not allow any real estate dealing and it is on this that the project is hanging fire. Interestingly, State Fisheries Minister and Smart City Kochi Chairman S. Sarma did not attend the meeting. And for the first time there were protests at the venue of the meeting. Members of the youth organisation of the ruling Left Democratic Front and the Revolutionary Socialist Party shouted slogans asking the state government to impelement the project.

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.