Yes, the vision many have suggested of individuals and communities creating their own 3D models for inclusion in Google Earth is playing out again. McMinnville Tennessee, population 13,000, is the latest entrant. With a $10,000 state grant, two Google trainers, and some free copies of SketchUp and Google Earth Pro, 25 volunteers are at work.

- Knoxville News Sentinel

GIS officials have built a 3D model of the country and found 70 locations "for the accurate observation of the moon."

- PressTV

CTO Justin Rattner gave a keynote address at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco highlighting how the 3D Web, with virutal and more realistic 3D renderings, is the future.

"This may be the killer app of killer apps," Rattner told reporters after they keynote. "As people demand a more immersive, a more realistic experience, they're just going to push the computing demands to unprecedented levels."

And of course, Intel will be there to provide chips to support all that rendering... Rattner was not all smiley; he noted challenges to 3D including standardization and user interfaces.

- InfoWorld

Frequent Directions Magazine contributor Gary Smith ("How Big is an Acre") is featured in his local paper, The Burlington Free Press, as he implements Google Earth in Shelburne and Essex, Vermont. Smith is leading the charge to get the small towns' public buildings (no private houses, due to privacy issues) into 3D in Google Earth. How?

To implement the program, the towns were asked to provide 10 to 12 computer-literate community members who would attend a day-long training to learn to "draw" the buildings in a virtual landscape. Each volunteer is asked to create at least 10 buildings, which will be housed in Google's "digital warehouse" and be made available to the public.

The program, which Smith created, is being funded by Google, and is provided free to the communities. In exchange for their time, volunteers will receive licenses for Google Earth Pro, a $400 program.

Town employees will be trained too. The towns see value in the 3D data both for planning and for expose to the rest of the world. Any small/medium-sized town in the U.S. is elegable to participate in Smith's program, which will continue to be offered free of charge.

Turns out, the fellow behind it, Ben Kacyra , "invented" the technology only after selling of his engineering company and tackling a challenge yet to be solved: the ability to map "as builts" in 3D. He found a CTO trained at Berkeley, licensed laser technology from MIT, and got Chevron on board before the product was complete. He sold the company to Leica in 2001. Now, he's returned to his childhood passion of archeology, working to get the still-expensive equipment into the hands of archeologists.

- San Francisco Chronicle

New Scientist describes work being done at Georgia Institute of Technology and Microsoft Research. It's just what you'd think: 3D cities changing over time. The pilot is being done for a bit of Atlanta.

To create a model of Atlanta, the researchers scanned in numerous historical photos of the city that had been snapped from similar vantage points. The software is designed to identify the 3D structures within the image and break them down into a series of points. It then compares the view in each one to work out why some of these points are visible in some of the images but not others. Was the building simply out of shot? Or was the view of one building blocked by another? "If we can rule out those two possibilities, then we know that the reason we don't see a building is because it didn't exist when the image was taken. Either it was not yet built or it had already been demolished," says [Grant] Schindler [Microsoft].

via ZDnet Blog post by Roland Piquepaille, which has images and lots of links to more info