3D Tour Builder

Create a 3d tour of your favorite spots. Perhaps you want to relive a recent trip, or share some of your favorite spots with your friends. Use this app to create and share spots in 3D.

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Inspiration

A way back when, Google Earth used to let you create globe hopping tours. Since then, there aren't many easy to use, realistic tour creation apps. Now with Google Maps Realistic 3D Tiles, visualizing spots around the world is a great way to relive vacations, or just showcase your favorite places.

What it does

This app has two components. First, a collection of favorites spots is compiled via an interactive 2D Google Map with a places search box. Once the collection of favorite spots has been collected, a 3D tour is launched. The Cesium app with the Google Maps Realistic 3D tiles will fly from one spot to the next, while pausing at each spot to render a realistic representation of the spot. The URL is unique, so, the tour can be shared.

How we built it

This app utilizes the Google Maps API, Places API, and Cesium JS. There is also some PHP utilized to save the favorite spot collection to a JSON data file.

Challenges we ran into

At the present iteration of the app, being able to capture the actual view (pitch, heading and camera height) is not supported.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Keeping the app as simple as possible is something to be proud of.

What we learned

Developing using Cesium JS was a first for sure.

What's next for 3D Tour Builder

Adding support for field of view capture. This will greatly enhance the experience.

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