It's all change in the world of online mapping. For a brief window of time Nokia has some world-leading technology in this area, but almost nobody knows about it, and it will soon be supplanted by better and more wide-spread technology from Google and Apple. However, if you can't wait to experience the 3D mapping recently announced and demonstrated by those companies then it's still well worth having a play with the Nokia site to see what is coming.
A few weeks ago Google announced the next generation of mobile maps for Android. Have a look at the video in that post to see what is coming. It's a largely automatically-generated 3D view of selected areas of the planet, with images overlayed on accurate height models. In the past within the 3D building layer of Google Earth you'll have seen laboriously hand-created 3D buildings plonked on a flat ground. Aside from the time-consuming process of creating these three-dimensional models there follows a vetting process to ensure only valid models become visible to the public. This new system can create 3D maps much more quickly and with less human input, and it accurately catches every aspect of the environment, not just those elements of interest to model makers. Trees, rocks and cliffs will accurately be depicted. Incidentally, this is quite a shift for the model makers themselves, some of who devoted years to creating models which will no longer be commonly seen.
As an aside, you may have noticed that the Google announcement also mentioned that true offline maps would be coming, not just the pesky Google Labs caching facility. However, it doesn't look like you can ditch your trusty old Nokia GPS phone holding the entire world in its memory, as Google Maps will only store 50MB, or enough to cover one large city, at a time.
Back to 3D maps, and Apple announced their very similar flyover feature. This looks to be using technology recently purchased from SAAB. Actually, that demo looks similar to something I played with four years ago. Investigating a little further I found that the technology made its way to Nokia last year, whose site requires a browser plug-in to view. This put me off, but more recently an experimental WebGL version was released. It runs in recent Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers without plug-ins, and covers 21 cities throughout the world, including London and Prague. I could spend many an hour exploring the world with this. It's especially fun with places I know, but also gives a good idea of what a town feels like, such as the ever present mountains peering over Cape Town.
WebGL, where image and height data is sent to the browser for processing via Javascript, opens the opportunity for hacking. There's nothing to stop enterprising programmers from grabbing the data for their own uses, and this process has already started.
3D mapping is a logical evolution of the current 2D maps. For Google it's an inevitable step along the road to merging all of their mapping products, including Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Streetview and their Google Earth layer of 3D buildings. It remains to be seen how widespread an area their, and Nokia and Apple's, 3D imagery will cover. If they display only a few of the most populous cities around the world then they'll be of limited use and interest. Apparently the data is quick to process from car, plane and satellite images and LIDAR, which leads to the hope that soon large swathes of the Earth will be covered, and covered areas will be updated promptly. Hurry up, future.