3pointD.com

Glitchy sends news of what appears to be video of a highly detailed, 3D navigable virtual France. Of course, the video is in French — all 11 minutes of it — but the GéoPortail app it demonstrates, from l’Institut Géographique National, is fascinating. Based on the video and according to this post on the Ogle Earth blog, the app layers a lot of information atop the kind of geographical data Google Earth provides: “In addition to aerial imagery, the video shows that there will also be topo maps and property maps (7:50) available, and 3D buildings (4:48), roads (4:30), all French postal addresses (7:10), and more. Some of these features will be pay services.” And all browsable in three dimensions.

I’m not clear on whether Google Earth is actually the underlying app, although I don’t imagine GéoPortail reinvented the wheel, so I’m guessing it is. As Ogle Earth’s Stefan Geens points out, things get really good when you start flying around the texture-mapped versions of French towns:

Municipal data mashed with 3D structures on a Google Earth-like map in GéoPortail: