Trondheim 3D demo in HD from Morten Jacobsen on Vimeo.
The movie above illustrates a preview of 3D Trondhiem in Norway, produced by C3.
The modelling process is automated, with the textures and mesh produced purely from imagery and not from the more traditional LiDAR approach. C3 are defiantly a company to watch out for in terms of 3D city models.
See http://kart.sesam.no/3d/ for a 3D flythough (Windows only at the moment) and http://www.c3technologies.com for more info.
buildings and streets is what we all have seen before, but what astonished me here is the appearance of trees and rocks!
i read that the model is build with pictures followed by navigation data. this kind of equipment must be very expensive so i dont expect it to hit our virtual cities anything near what birds eye view did.
but i anticipate soon to come some technology that will join pointcloud (microsoft photosynth) with 3d (like google sketchup does photomatch). it has to happen, right 😉 ?
Have you checked out http://www.nearglobal.com/
NearGlobal is looking impressive… we are looking forward to seeing what its like at launch 🙂
C3’s stuff looks good from a distance, but really melted geometry close up! Probably why you can’t zoom in very close in their 3d application. some screenshots show that the geometry is like raw lidar apart from a few buildings that look to be manually edited: http://labs.finn.no/blog/sesam-3d-map-3d-revolution-people
Here’s what the experts have to say about the detail/quality + screenshots:
http://www.digitalearthblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/hitta.jpg
http://www.ogleearth.com/2008/05/see_a_3d_map_of.html
Does anyone else also think that all this 3D city modeling is going to be like “social user gen networking “
in other words no WAY to monetize to pay back all the hyped investment?
whos going to really pay to use these models and for what ?