The German Government has released some 3D buildings in Google Earth. According to the site, approximately 10% of the city is modeled, amounting to about 44,000 buildings!

Following is a 2 minute clip of the experience from Washington, DC.

This is great news for the virtual earth community, as it proves that third party community contribution can really work. There are also some caveats to be learned from this model.

• The experience is very different from other Google-supported areas like Denver (video)
• There are multiple detail levels depending on the importance or architectural significance of the building in question
• Performance is dependent on where the models come from - in this case we assume a server in Berlin
• Rather than show all of the buildings at once, they have implemented their own "performance algorithm" that shows buildings in a narrow field of view

From the announcement:

In order to convey an impression of the cityscape of Berlin, some 800 facades across the city were photographed and the remaining building models textured - that is, assigned a facade - at random using these photos.

Personally, I don't want an "impression" of a cityscape. If I were a city planner, emergency manager or tax assessor, I would want to ensure that the building I was looking at is accurate both in geometry as well as texture, especially for those buildings that people don't look at every day. I also noticed that there is no "collision detection" on the buildings (i.e. as you get close to them, there are no obstructions, allowing you to inadvertently fly right through them.) And I assume it's a graphics driver glitch, by the buildings seemed to float about 300 feet above the ground on my system.

That aside, this is still a momentous achievement for which the team should be proud. It would be very interesting to know how many people contributed, how much it cost and how long this effort took, in order to gauge how long we'll have to wait for similar cities to be "born".

The Microsoft Virtual Earth team has automated the 3D building process with a pipeline that takes aerial imagery on one side, and through a photogrammetric process spits out highly accurate textured models on the other side in approximately 7 days (average 200 sq. km.) But I haven't yet seen a city with 44,000 buildings in it!

The nice thing about the Microsoft process is that you can be assured of the quality and performance of the buildings, including in highly dense urban areas such as this part of Boston's North End.

The image on the left is in Virtual Earth 3D, and the image to the right is in 2 dimensional Bird's Eye mode. Click on the images to see these areas in Virtual Earth.

This is all great progress on the road to creating a true 3D world. Great work Berlin!