Google likes young people, and young people like Google; the company reports that its “Build Your Campus in 3D Competition” received around 4,000 entries. Seven winning teams have now been selected.
These champs, who hail from the University of Minnesota, Purdue University, Concordia University, Loyola Campus, Stanford University, Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne, the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, and Dartmouth College, will now get to spend three days at the Googleplex. Their work will also be added to Google Earth’s 3D layer. Pretty cool, right?
“We couldn’t help but be impressed with the effort put forth by the many teams and individuals who participated,” said the contest’s judges in an official statement. “The selection of finalists was the result of a lively discussion and a careful model review; ultimately, the top teams’ entries bubbled to the top.”
You can view those entries for yourself at the contest’s official website, yet some are much larger than others, and as Frank Taylor of the Google Earth Blog notes, “it is a slow process loading up hundreds of building models this way. I’ll let you know when the models are in the layers.”
As Taylor’s statement may have led you to notice, this competition has benefited Google, as well as those winning teams; Google Earth and Google SketchUp have gotten quite a bit of publicity out of it. They’ve received free data from some very talented people, as well. This isn’t a bad thing; it’s just that, as usual, Google has proven itself a master of PR.
