More cities and coverage in Building Maker

Hot on the heels of the new 3D buildings feature for Android, Google has now made it easier to add 3D buildings to Google Earth with the expansion of a few cities in their excellent Building Maker tool.

In particular, the coverage area for Fresno, Lake Tahoe, Austin, Phoenix, Sacramento, San Diego and St. Louis have all been expanded to allow you to model more of the sub-urban areas around the cities. For example, look at the map of Phoenix below; the blue outline shows the previous coverage, while the white outline shows the new coverage — a major increase!

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To try it for yourself, simply head over to the Building Maker site and give it a shot.

Google releases a lot more Street View imagery in Germany

A few weeks ago, amid a good bit of controversy, Google finally released Street View in Germany. It was a well-publicized release, largely due to the thousands of blurred houses, but it only covered tiny sections of a few cities. Now that has changed.

While it’s still not the solid coverage like we see in the US or the UK, the coverage has just been expanded quite a bit, now covering 20 cities in Germany.

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[UPDATE: The official post from Google is up.]

I haven’t seen an official list of updated cities yet, but it seems to include Bielefeld, Berlin, Bonn, Bremen, Dusseldorf, Dresden. Hamburg, Hannover, Koln (Cologne), Leipzig, Mannheim, Munchen (Munich), Nurnberg, Stuttgart and Wuppertal.

If you’re not familiar with using Street View in Google Earth, check out this great tutorial that Frank created last year.

Have you noticed new Street View imagery in any other cities/countries? Leave a comment and let us know!