Visit Hamburg From Home

So this very city that I happen to live in will be the first city worldwide to receive full textured 3D models in Google Earth. Wonder why they chose Hamburg? It's surely not so famous that it would be the first town to come to your mind.

The article (I couldn't find an English article on the topic, so you'll have to learn German or just believe what I'm saying here) says that the idea came from some Hamburg initiative and the image data used for the for the models and textures was provided by a local survey agency. A Swiss company specializing in 3D worlds then built the models and extracted the textures from the aforementioned aerial photos. Whaa?! How does this work? Did they cut out every wall by hand and transformed it into a plain front-view texture? That's gotta be a LOT of work, and would likely result in a miserable image quality due to the excessive perspective transformations - although you can't expect hi-resolution textures being transmitted through the web anyway.

And while this three-dimensional city is not even available yet (but will be “in a few days or weeks”), the creators are already dreaming of the next step: Modelling the insides of buildings as well, so you can actually go inside and do a complete virtual sightseeing trip. Crazy.

The area covered in 3D will not include all of Hamburg though, just the inner city. So, chances are good that my place will still be just a flat texture on the ground.

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