Paris in 3D

The Eiffel Tower is one of the most popular sights in Google Earth, and it’s had a high-quality 3D model for a few years now. However, the rest of the city has been rather flat — until now.

Google has rolled out extensive 3D building coverage for the city and it looks great! (NOTE from Frank: There are some areas – especially around the Eiffel Tower, where the building models look half-finished. Many of the sides are missing photo-realistic textures. But, hopefully this will inspire people to use Building Maker to finish the models.]

paris.jpg

Check out some of the cool sites like the Eiffel Tower, the Notre Dame Cathedral or the the Arc de Triomphe.

To simply explore the city for yourself, fly there using this KML file.

GIS user video Natural Earth free Vector + Raster GIS data

Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales. Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software. This video introduces you to the resource and walks you through the cool features of the website