The Art of Not Knowing
If You Tweet It, He Will Come
Edgewater Hotel Sign Comes Down
The Daily Photoist: November 20, 2009
Newsstand: November 20, 2009
When Google rolled out the Street View version of Google Maps, a rift in the space/time continuum (or, so they claim, an error in stitching together the shots) appeared to produce, from some viewpoints in the city, duplicate CN Towers. But Google wasn't done with our poor CN Tower—no, now that Google Maps also features wireframe renderings of many downtown buildings, the Tower's been stripped of its charm and turned into the city's tallest and girth-iest perfect cylinder, seemingly the result of an algorithm that determines the outline of a building's base and then pairs it with that building's height.
A few of Toronto's other iconic but weirdly-shaped downtown buildings didn't fare much better, either:
City Hall, above, becomes a walled fortress, somehow even more ominous than the building that starred in Resident Evil: Apocalypse.
OCAD's be-stilted Sharp Centre for Design: newly boring.
U of T's Robarts Library just looks like it wants a hug.
And, probably for the better, Google didn't even attempt to render the horror of geometry that is the Royal Ontario Museum.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
Yeah well, an height map is only about a million times easier & faster to work with... as a coder I approve of this shortcut.
1) google's crowdsourcing their 3d models for maps now, maybe soon we'll start seeing more & better models. toronto is one of the 50 cities on their initial 'mappable' list.
2) "starred"
Apparently, according to that screenshot, the CN Tower is the new home of Citytv.
Well, the Skydome fared alright.
Even with the current shortcomings, this will really improve way-finding.