Google Wants Africa in 3D for Google Earth As Well

If you’ve been using Google Earth lately, or maybe the new Earth view in Google Maps, you’ve noticed that there are plenty of 3D models for buildings and landmarks. They’re a welcomed addition to an otherwise static and ‘flat’ world. Well, you’re about to see even more of them, as Google has expanded the Building Maker tool with support for a number of new locations in Africa and a couple in the US.

“You might have noticed that the Building Maker team has been quiet on the city front in the last month. Well, we’ve been working behind the scenes to make our next set of cities available for modeling. With 11 new cities, Google Building Maker has extended its coverage to include nine new cities in South Africa and two new regions (plus added coverage of two existing regions) in California,” Matt Simpson, User Experience Designer at Google, wrote.

The nine new cities supported in South Africa are: Bloemfontein, Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg, Nelspruit, Phokeng, Polokwane, Port, Elizabeth and Pretoria. California gets two new cities, Oakland and Berkeley, and extended coverage in San Francisco and Redwood city.

Google Building Maker is a free tool that makes creating 3D models for Google Earth a trivial task. It provides the users with aerial imagery and other data they may need and makes it easy to create a simple model of a building. It’s no replacement for more professional tools, like Google’s own SketchUp 3D modeler, or for actual modeling skills, but, for plenty of buildings, it’s good enough.

Google has been relying on its users to help it map out the world and, more recently, to recreate it in 3 dimensions. The company runs the Map Maker program, which allows users to create maps of their home town or any other place on Earth. The program has been highly successful and has resulted in significantly more detailed mapping data in plenty of countries. Now, Google is trying to do the same with Building Maker, which was launched last autumn.