Editor’s Note: This post is part of our Google I/O 2023 series sharing the latest Google Maps Platform news from our annual developer conference. To learn more about our new immersive experience products, join our I/O session when it premieres at 1:15 p.m. PT.

Today we’re launching the Experimental release of Photorealistic 3D Tiles, available through the Map Tiles API. This new geodata product offers a seamless 3D mesh model of the real-world, textured with our high-res RGB optical imagery, and uses the same 3D map source as Google Earth. Specifically designed for visualization at city block to citywide scale, you can use Photorealistic 3D Tiles to visualize over 2500 cities across 49 countries and create 3D visualization experiences directly in your app. 

Design 3D experiences the easier way

Building 3D models of the world is labor and resource intensive. It requires executing an image capture campaign, weeks to months of processing imagery and federating it into a textured 3D model, and finally hosting it to support your visualization experience. Photorealistic 3D Tiles takes this work off your plate with one of the world’s most comprehensive 3D geo datasets, while allowing you to use the renderer of your choice and overlay your own data. Our 3D tiles align to our 2D maps, so you can accurately overlay your own data or Google Maps Platform data to customize your visualizations. We’ve also adopted the commonly-used Open Geospatial Consortium’s 3D Tiles standard created by Cesium. That means you can render our 3D map tiles with your own renderer or other compatible renderers and visualization libraries, like CesiumJS and deck.gl. 

Visualize large datasets with 3D context

You can also display other geospatial datasets, such as traffic, viewshed models, or land temperature on top of our 3D tiles to bring more realism and context to your visualizations. As you can see in this example provided by CARTO, it’s possible now to visualize large datasets in BigQuery with richer 3D context worldwide.