3pointD.com

Google announced yesterday that it would hold a 3D building competition for university students, in which students in the U.S. and Canada are asked to model their university campus in 3D using SketchUp. Entries are due by June 1, and the top 50 team members receive an all-expense-paid trip to the Googleplex to participate in a three-day workshop with Google’s modeling experts. This is pretty cool, as far as it goes — it just doesn’t go very far. It seems to me this is just about the most boring way possible to promote the use of SketchUp and Google Earth for cool 3D modeling stuff. What do you think?

Recreating your college campus sounds more like a rote homework assignment to me than a way to foster the kind of creativity that really grabs people and leads to wider adoption of a tool like SketchUp. Google isn’t looking for creativity at all here, just technical skills. Of course, judging a creative contest is a very different thing from judging how well a team has replicated a real-world location. But it also speaks to Google’s vision of Google Earth. There are many more things you could do with the app than just fill it with 3D models of buildings that already exist. I’d argue that it’s not too soon to start exploring and promoting those uses. Uncharacteristically, Google seems to be taking a more cautious approach.

For anyone interested in modeling with SketchUp, of course, this would be a cool contest to be involved in. Here’s hoping, though, that Google stretches its brain a bit more in future, since it seems to be missing an opportunity here.