Germany

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• GeoContent GmbH appears to be the major distributor of aerials and DEMs for Germany
  • the only company with a countrywide digital aerial image
  • as of 2005 their DEMs are rather low resolution, but there is a deal with Intermap to co-produce next-generation DEM/aerials (presumably 5m DEM)
• Aerowest.de claims to have "plugin-free, cost-free access to geodata of Germany"
  • which includes aerials, DTM and even city models
• CyberCity AG
  • Has produced 3D models of downtown Karlsruhe and Giessen (about 2000 buildings)
  • also in April 2005, CyberCity announced completion of a pilot project in Munich, comprised of a 16 square kilometer area in the districts of Maxvorstadt and Schwabing, for the Bavarian Surveying Administration
  • As of 2008, they are called CyberCity 3D and they were a collaborative partner with Google in their "Cities in 3D" program
• Realcity has done some modeling of the cities of Dortmund, Bochum, and Frankfurt
• Frida: Freie Vektor-Geodaten Osnabrück is possibly the only free street-level dataset in all of Europe.
• Google
  • 3D building models for Berlin and Stuttgart were added in 2010
• Regensburg3D
  • A standalone Java-based viewer for a nice small dataset of Regensburg.  It works well, easy to navigate, and has a good aerial photo as base map.  You can toggle extruded building footprints and there are a few textured buildings.
• Heidelberg 3D
  • A testbed for 3D GDI projects at Department of Geography University of Bonn, using many OGC standards.
  • "GDI3D - Spatial Data Infrastructure for 3D-Geodata"
  • The Heidelberg model is unfortunately provided as a Java application called XNavigator.  When i tested it in 2010, It was difficult to install, consumed hundreds of MB, was painfully slow to run, and ultimately unresponsive.  Finally i had to kill the task.  Hopefully they will release a non-Java viewer at some point.
• March 2007: Berlin in 3D Released for Google Earth.
  • "44,000 buildings of Berlin. Five of the buildings are available in the 'highest resolution' with even interior details including the Reichstag Building and the Olympic Stadium. Made possible with help by Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam and a spin-off called 3D Geo GmbH. Developed by the State of Berlin and Berlin Partner GmbH."
  • Main site is The Official Berlin 3D City Model.  'present model covers about 10% of the area of Berlin and therefore constitutes only a small sample of the official three-dimensional city model of Berlin'
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• Rostock
  • In 2011, the OpenDEM website appeared, with sample data of the City of Rostock
  • The data is 29094 3D points, sparse, apparently gathered from an aerial stereo camera.
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• Stuttgart
  • As of 2003, the city of Stuttgart had acquired a large city model.  There was a project at IFP (University of Stuttgart) to produce a realtime visualization of the model, resulting in a paper:
  • Kada, M., Roettger, S., Weiss, K. , Ertl, T. , Fritsch, D.  Real-Time Visualisation of Urban Landscapes Using Open-Source Software (pdf) In: Proceedings of ACRS 2003 ISRS
  • Area 50x50km, 3D city model provided by the City Surveying Office of Stuttgart, DTMs at 10m for the inner city, 30m for the surroundings. Aerial and satellite images of 0.8m and 5m res.  36,000 buildings, 1.5 million triangles, facade textures on 500 buildings.  Used libMini and OSG for libraries, Impostors and building footprint simplification for LOD and performance.
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  • In 2007, another group at Stuttgart University of Applied Science called Virtual Environmental Planning Project (VEPs) developed a 'planning tool' website for proposed redevelopment of the Rosensteinviertel area in Stuttgart
    • "allows you to move around an area of Stuttgart in 2D and choose to view specific planning development areas in 3D.  You can then explore the 3D model."
    • Unfortunately, they used "Bitmanagement Contact VRML/X3D" so navigation is awkward and it constantly nags you to buy it.  I wasn't able to tell which way is north to correlate the 2D and 3D views, nor did the components like buildings appear in the 2D view.  Perhaps with a lot of training and previous direct knowledge of the area, it might work better.