Google to build local map content in 3D

26 March 2007: In January, Google set up the contest in small part to draw college students into using the Sketchup tool and become familiar with it, but the bigger goal was likely to improve content for Google Earth in areas of significant value for which they didn't have ready access to good or detailed data. As Google Earth is being enhanced, there's been increasing supposition that the company was planning to use it as a foundation for a new virtual reality.

After street/road maps of cities and the country, college campuses are where there is another substantial consumer demand for good maps. There are over 4,000 colleges and universities in the US, with around 17 million college students. All of the universities and colleges try to provide some sort of printout maps of their campuses which pinpoint building locations in relation to surrounding streets, parking lots, and other landmarks.

The top online map providers do not have good campus maps in most cases, since the US Postal Service doesn't typically deliver directly to each building on university campuses, they deliver mail to one, central address for the university campus, and the university distributes the mail from there. Because of this, many of these buildings do not have a direct street address, making it impossible to pinpoint them using US Postal data, which is used in part for geocoding home and business addresses.

In most cases, college campuses are marked in online maps with little more than an outline of campus or a perimeter outline with the campus building footprints shown, effectively rendering the maps irrelevant once a user arrives at the campus.

Knowing that a building is square when viewed from above, along with many other rectangular buildings in the same area doesn't help much since most consumers are not be trained in mentally projecting how those outlines should appear to them when viewed in profile as they are walking across campus. Even being able to see the roofs of the buildings from the satellite images wouldn't necessarily help much, either. The top mapping providers don't even display labels for the building names.

Even with less-than-ideal graphic representation, some universities have opted to use the Google Maps API to mashup their buildings and parking info with the existing birds-eye-view maps and sat images, such as: Stanford, Texas A&M, and Tufts.

Considering the need for better campus maps, and their decision to host the Sketchup contest, it's not at all inconceivable that Google might be looking to create better interactive campus maps for universities, perhaps with an extra option for "Perspective View" alongside their standard "Map", "Satellite", and "Hybrid" options.

source: http://searchengineland.com