Google 3D Buildings Fredericton

Fredericton & Cities in 3D Program
Rob Lunn, GIS Coordinator for the City, told us that he discovered the Google Earth 3D building models and SketchUp utility at the GeoWeb Conference in 2008. City employees were already using Google Earth for work or personal purposes.

Rob Lunn said, "I knew there was a program to upload data to Google and getting data to Google was a big initiative for us. We wanted to find avenues to release available data and information to be public at large and the Cities in 3D Program seemed like a perfect solution."


"We decided to go through the Cities in 3D Program because of time and having Google folks involved helped speed it up. We want our city to be discoverable through Google as well as through our local website. But if there are people going straight to Google, we want them to discover it there too."

History of Sharing
The City of Fredericton has a partnership with the local Military in New Brunswick, Canadian Forces Base Gagetown. The CFB Gagetown is one of the largest military bases in Canada. "We provided data for creating models (building footprints with heights, DEM, aerial photography, oblique angle aerial photography collected by a firm with an ultra light plane and street level photography) and they built up the data sets. The group is the Army Learning Support Center for Tactics School and one of the largest bases in Canada," says Rob Lunn. This high-tech military group took this model and integrated it into a first person tactics game. They wanted a real life model for training purposes.

"We also meet PSAB (Public Sector Accounting Board) legislation for tracking assets. From a city perspective, we have to know the tree cover, quantity of trees, park benches, how many meters of sidewalks, how many meters of sewer pipes, etc. We truly have to know what we have because they have to be accounted for. There's an expense and you have to replace the sidewalk, etc. We have to have a good understanding of what we own."

Fredericton in Google Earth
"Of course, we're interested in promoting Fredericton and have people discover the 3D models, that's wonderful for us. For staff it is important to be able to see the impact that buildings or other structures (e.g signage) have on the streetscape. Right now, we're using the models more for tourism and economic development, but plan to expand into more areas. What motivated us to contribute our data was the opportunity to make the information available to a wider audience through a tool (Google Earth) that they are already using.

Over 100 photo-textured 3D buildings in Fredericton were added to Google Earth in January 2010. The buildings included government offices, commercial buildings and parking structures. To visit Fredericton, download Google Earth and search for "Fredericton, Canada" and make sure the "3D Buildings" layer is checked.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Fredericton
• Fergus
• Breen
• Google
• 3d

[MrGreekba]

id like to play black ops on that map

[ethosflux]

Ashame the 3d view of Fredericton fails to capture the racism and inbreeding of the townies.

[polerix]

Now add in the steam tunnels, travel INSIDE the bridge, unb tunnels! GoogleGasm!

[rockboytyler]

Cool man, you forgot to name the place where you started, where it's all started....Nicky Zees!

Nice work!

Glad Google picked us up! It's a great city to live in!

[TheMessianicManic]

LOL "city of Frert'n"