Preview of Geoportail’s 3D functionality

One of our readers, Yann, emailed me with some additional information about Geoportail, the French web mapping application, and included a link to a video of a French blogger’s interview with Patrick LeBoeuf, of the French National Geographic Institute, doing a demo of Geoportail’s 3D functionality on a laptop. The video is about 11 minutes long and the conversation is in French (I can follow about 60% of what they are saying), but it does show the current 3D functionality, including imagery overlaid on terrain, and also topographic maps overlaid as well. The flight features are pretty standard and functioned smoothly, at least when Patrick was driving it. For the 3D, they have simple building extrusion, and are also planning to use photos for texture mapping facades. One thing that will go beyond Google Earth is the plan to extrude buildings for all cities, towns, and villages. They are planning to debut the 3D app in the fall or possibly in early 2007, so it will be interesting to see how the public version works. In the meantime, check out the vidcast and see for yourself.