Experience the Winter Games in 3D!

The Google Boulder office is fanatical about 3D buildings in Google Earth, so you might imagine our delight when the folks over at EarthvisionZ dropped by the office to show us what they've been working on for the upcoming 2010 Winter Games.

EarthvisionZ is a geo-web development firm. Our first experience with their work was with EarthgamZ, where they developed a virtual experience for the 2008 Summer Olympics and Sports Illustrated's Top 100 Golf Courses in the U.S. EarthvisionZ is the next generation of that work and is well timed to take advantage of all the growing excitement about the games.

The first thing I did was fly to Colorado to see how many athletes we were sending to the Olympics from our sports-crazed state. Instead of getting a list of names on a page I was presented with a map of of custom placemarks depicting the name of each athlete and their sport. If you click on an athlete's name, it shows athlete stats, news, medal wins, social links, and a brief bio.


EarthvisionZ makes good use of the 3D models that we developed for the Winter Games. Clicking on any of the building placemarks produces an event and TV schedule so you know when your favorite athlete or sport is scheduled.

If you happen to be lucky enough to be attending the games, the "Getting There" link is pretty handy as it provides a visual mapping of your travel options, link to tickets, and border wait times. Once there, the "Being There" tab will help you navigate the city and find what your looking for quickly and easily with reviews and live tweets on the ground.

Posted by Bruce Polderman, Product Manager