Google maps goes WebGL with 45deg sat views.

[Redrobes]

Yeah I think Ravs posted a link up a few months back about Saab's terrain scanning system which had some details about it. Basically as I recall, its done with an array of quality digital cameras on a plane and the images are compared to get depth info. I think the bit I was impressed with tho is the way Saab were then classifying the results - as in this is a tree, this is a building, this is a beach etc. From there I assume that corners of buildings near to 90deg were fixed up. If you fly over NY and near to ground zero at the wharf of Manhattan then you can see trees where they are blobby with no undercuts to them. Thats a dead giveaway that it was scanned. Could be done with LIDAR but I expect it was from multiple photos since you get nice texture maps for the sides of the buildings. The proof would be if there was something temporal in the terrain that was moving but yet still in 3D and textured. That would mean the 3D and the color texture were done at the same time.

BTW if anyone is interested in playing with terrain reconstruction from multiple photos then my blog here has an instructional about it using free tools. The results are not great tho at this point. I think Saab have done a somewhat better job of it.

Edit2: Oh, Just went to the outerra forums where I posted about this as well a long while back and someone there was saying that it was Nokia that was using this data so I guess this is from the Saab scanning system. For anyone without a GL browser, heres what were talking about.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHUbhgsimDs