Latest news from the 3D Travel websites
by Google Earth Blog on Aug.07, 2012, under 3D Models, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, California, Denmark, England, Germany, Google Earth News, Google Earth Tips, Google Sky, Google maps, Hawaii, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Natural Landmarks, Netherlands, Sightseeing, Street Views, USA
Over the years we've shown you a handful of projects from the 3DTravel.com folks. They built the impressive 3DHawaii two years ago (and recently covered the two-year anniversary on their blog), then followed it up with 3DLasVegas and 3DSanFrancisco. The sites are very well done, and are great tools to help explore those areas.
Since the launch of the San Francisco site earlier this year, they've stayed quite busy. They acquired a mobile app to help people navigate their cities once they've arrived. You can read about that acquisition on their blog here.
They've also added a handful of additional private label products (found here) and added translation tools to help those sites quickly translate their content into any language (such as this site with its Japanese translation).
As you may remember, Google added quite a lot of new Street View imagery to Hawaii in June, and 3DTravel makes extensive use of that imagery.
Google is planning to roll out their new 3D Imagery to the desktop and (presumably) the API later this year, so it'll be interesting to see how this affects the 3DTravel sites. 3D Travel has built some amazing models to supplement their sites, and it would be a shame to see them all go away. On the other hand, areas will certainly look better from afar with the new imagery, so it may vary a bit from case-to-case. I expect Google will offer some kind of option in the API to choose which kind of imagery/terrain/buildings to show, so nothing will necessarily have to change for them right away.
In any case, congrats to 3DTravel for everything they've accomplished and best of luck to them in the future.