You have to see this to believe it. Above is a demo video of Paris 3D, a tourist guide to France’s beautiful capital city in photo-realistic 3D.
It looks absolutely stunning. The detail is unbelievable. Here’s a massive virtual city on your iPhone — right down to the gargoyles. There’s even people and vehicles — plus their shadows! — for added realism.
You can zoom in to particular streets or buildings, or zoom out to get a global view of the city’s layout. Tap on a building to get a data sheet on the structure, which includes the building’s history, photos, and where appropriate, phone numbers or opening times (like a museum).
Type a destination, and you zoom across the 3D city to see it.
You can to highlight particular categories of buildings — hotels and restaurants, for example, which show up color coded on the 3D map, making them easy to spot in a global view. The app is GPS-enabled, so you just tap a button to get directions. Street names are overlaid.
Performance looks fantastic. It renders better than Google maps. The demo looks like it was filmed on a iPhone emulator running on a developer computer. But if performance is as good on a real iPhone, it’ll be killer.
The app has just been submitted to the iTunes App store and should be available soon pending Apple’s approval.
The developer, Newscape Technology, claims it took twenty man-years of R&D over a four year period to develop, and is the first in a series of city guides.
Move over Google Maps!
Link to the Mobile 3D City website.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
4 responses to “Wow! Check Out This Amazing 3D Map of Paris”
WOW….Paris is really very beautiful…..And this is really great map…Loved it….Cheers!!
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