Introducing Google Building Maker

Ever found yourself being an armchair tourist looking at 3D buildings of your home town in Google Earth? Have you ever wanted to highlight that famous building in your city or on your campus, but not really been sure where to start?

Building Maker helps you put buildings on the 3D map.

Today we launched Google Building Maker, a fun and simple (and crazy addictive, it turns out) online tool for creating buildings for Google Earth. Basically, you pick a building and construct a model of it using aerial photos and simple 3D shapes – both of which we provide. When you're done, we take a look at your model. If it looks right, and if a better model doesn't already exist, we add it to the 3D Buildings layer in Google Earth.

Check out this video to see Building Maker in action:

For now, you can choose to make buildings in any of about 50 cities. We'll keep adding more cities, but don't feel left out if we don't have your hometown yet — modeling in a place you've never been is a fantastic way to discover more about it.

Simply, make sure you have the latest version of Google Earth installed on your computer. If you're on a Mac, you will need to download the Google Earth plug-in directly.

Building Maker is free and available in 14 languages. Go to www.google.com/buildingmaker to join the worldwide mapping community. Have fun!

Posted by Mark Limber, Product Manager and Matt Simpson, User Experience Designer