Play the CityOne Game

IBM has launched CityOne, a serious game that aims to raise awareness, and help address some of the challenges and solutions for building a smarter city.

Mangroves of Mexico as Google Earth Outreach example for GE6 in cooperation with CONABIO

Three weeks ago, Google had launched its new version 6 of Google Earth parallel to the Cancun conference, where Google Earth Outreach participated as well. Now, Google Earth Outreach together with the Mexican National Commission for Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity CONABIO launched the first outreach project taking advantage of the newly implemented tree representations (download the kmz into GE here). The trees still look a bit sketchy in comparison to other products but the visualization seems to be based on credible and sophisticated vegetation data.

Source: Google Earth Outreach

CityEngine Vue

This blog has already reported about the landscape renderer Vue and about CityEngine, a tool by Swiss company Procedural Inc. that allows creating 3d city models from scratch. Now, there is a new product marrying both, CityEngine Vue.

Almost unnoticed: Bing Maps 3D is dead

I was trying to re-visit the SpeedTree trees in Bing Maps 3D, but strangely the 3D interface of Bing Maps has disappeared. Then I found  this announcement on Bing Maps Blog.

Many comments express their concerns about the discontinuation of the 3D control, SDK licensees seemed totally surprised that 3D control is discontinued without a replacement or replacement announcement. Has Mircosoft given up to compete with Google Earth?