The First Edition of the 3D Atlas of Ann Arbor captured six years of work on this topic prior to July, 2006.  While the earlier files in that work are important to understand the development of the project and also to track how technological and planning development did or did not mesh, the more recent files in it appear of greater interest to most.  The file that contains a great deal of detail of a few blocks of downtown Ann Arbor, coupled with music to make points that were, at the time, difficult to capture otherwise, seem of particular interest (to display this file, one needs to have installed some browser free plug-in to interact with the virtual reality--Cortona is one option).  That file is actually three linked files and it was designed to suggest possible flooding/ponding scenarios in the downtown using a sort of "theatrical" approach.  It also incorporated links on buildings, in the spirit of suggesting directions for various emergency management applications.   At the time, it was very difficult at the time to create a model of the entire creek floodplain; hence, only a few blocks were shown. 

     The advent of good aerials of Ann Arbor in Google Earth^®, in September of 2006, made it possible to overcome such difficulty.  The earlier strategy of lifting a plane through modeled topography could now be employed on the existing terrain in Google Earth^®.  Terrain no longer needed to be modeled; previously, a Triangulated Irregular Network had been created from contour maps in GIS software and then imported to high-end graphics software.  The resulting files were very large and precluded any possibility of showing a vast expanse of terrain.  Still, Google Earth^® did not become really useful until good aerials of Ann Arbor appeared already installed in Google Earth^®.  Then, the matter of pulling a plane through various elevations to simulate how contours fill with water became a strategy that could make some sense:  one could at least have an aerial view of the urban context in which such filling was taking place.  Beyond the general aerial context, showing considerable detail for the entire city, one might wish also to have 3D buildings modeled so that when one drives laterally through the city, the buildings appear upright and in fact might show, when coupled with the planes representing water, the elevation to which the water would reach on buildings.

Links to files showing 'five-globe awards':

File 0
File 1

     In Google Earth^® one has simultaneously a browser, a 3D navigational tool, and more.  Thus, it is important to attempt to capture all of the previous 3D Atlas work within the Google Earth^® context.  It is to this latter task that this second edition is devoted.  The reader of this book will need to download a free version of Google Earth^® in order to understand the content.  It is highly recommended that the reader do so right now, before proceeding with the remainder of the work.

Link to Google Earth^®, version 4 beta, download.