By Randall S. Newton
Editor-in-Chief
As reported earlier this week, (here, here, and here) Google has made significant updates to Google Earth and SketchUp. When I wrote in April about Google Earth being “the foundation for the next advance in AEC visualization,” I expected that a mix of existing and new AEC-related CAD products would be the primary tools for this next advance. Now I’m not so certain. When Google added support for COLLADA to the Google Earth KML file format (the format for importing models into Google Earth), Google employees explained it as a way to add textures (bit-mapped images) to models for increased visual realism.
During the Google Geo Developer’s Day meeting Monday, several times Google employees made passing reference to “KML creation tools” without going into any detail. At first I assumed they were referring primarily to SketchUp, but then also to the various AEC CAD tools that have added KML export in the last few months. But a note from a programmer familiar with COLLADA opened my eyes to what “KML creation tools” really means as of this week. The Webmaster for Khronos.org writes:
“With COLLADA as the KML geometry and texture format you can use any of the popular 3D modeling applications including Maya, SoftImage|XSI, 3ds Max, Blender, and SketchUp of course, to create sophisticated models with textures, export them as COLLADA, and then import or drag and drop them into Google Earth. Combined with the new KML support for LOD [level-of-detail] and streaming, you have some pretty high-performance 3D visualization capabilities for AEC. What is also interesting is that this means game developers can now start using their assets in Google Earth. This has some big implications for simulations and visualizations!”
Big implications indeed. If you were Mr. and Mrs. Young Couple hoping to use Google Earth to look at houses to buy in their real-world setting, would you care if the models were created in ArchiCAD or SoftImage? I know what some of you are thinking: “But our tools are better for modeling the built environment.” Yes, but they don’t know that, do they?
The Khronos Group is the non-profit organization that maintains the COLLADA format. On its website, it describes COLLADA as:
“an XML-based schema for 3D authoring applications to freely exchange digital assets without loss of information. This enables multiple software packages to be combined into extremely powerful tool chains.”
“Extremely powerful tool chains” sounds like interoperability nirvana to me. I’ll be keeping a watch on this as things develop. And, as always, I invite you to add your comments.
Technorati Tags: Google Google Earth GIS Google Maps 3D COLLADA geospatial imagery texture KML game development XML Khronos interoperability digital assets