OpenStreetMap
Recently there has been several implementations of 3D and 2.5D (isometric) rendering of OSM. Honestly, I haven’t been enthusiastic by any of them. One of the reason is that apparently no one is trying to actually represent streets (the S of OSM) better than flat spaghettis.
I’ve just seen this map, and I got faith again that 2.5D representation can be useful and beautiful: http://gz.o.cn/
This is the map of Guangzhou (China). Several other big Chinese cities are also available. There are so many amazing things in this map: * multiple level streets are (almost) readable. * building shapes and texture are so precise that each remarkable building is distinguishable on the map. * POI are active: they are not just a big stamp on top of the map, they can be shown or hidden, and react to mouse hover. * It’s so amazing complete (fair enough, the quality of London in OSM is probably almost on par) * It makes any city look like a city from SimCity 2000 ;-)
Hopefully eventually it will be possible to see OSM data rendered as such 2.5D quality map!
Discussion
Comment from Vincent de Phily on 25 September 2013 at 09:06
That map really is amazing, there really is somthing to say about 2.5D and cartoon-like graphics for readability. The full-3D osm projects are great, but they somehow manage to be more toy-like than this. Another case of beautiful Vs usable.
I’d love to see an OSM version of that, but we are far from having enough data. OTOH, it seems that very few (if any) buildings in your example have been rendered directly from GIS data : the work is done by an artist each time. We could certainly achieve something close by using a few flexible renderable models and some artistic liberties.