A couple weeks ago I was playing a bit with the Geobrowser module for Drupal. And since I am a huge fan of Sketchup and lately the nice Hypercosm exporter for Sketchup (to view and annote your 3D models online) I made a small demo-website.

This demo-website is showing the capabilities of Drupal, the Geobrowser module, Sketchup and Hypercosm all together.

Click on the appropriate flag to display the corresponding 3D model of the building or construction. You can also (de)select from which country you want to display the 3D models (one of the nice features of the Geobrowser module, taxonomy based menu's). The demo works great in Firefox but a little bit buggy in IE.

link to the demo-website

I am a big fan of Sketchup (or in other words too lazy to learn CAD) and I am working with it for both professional and personal projects. Sketchup offers simple and user friendly tools, add-ons and plugins to quickly draw and render (e.g. the Kerkythea plugin) a professional 3D model of an object, construction, scenery or the like.

For a long time I was on the look-out for a simple but powerful plugin or add-on with which I am able to export and embed a produced 3D model online. For instance with the RPS 3D PDF exporter you are able to export a model to a 3D pdf file which you can view with your standard pdf reader (also online). However, with this method you are only able to rotate the 3D model a bit.

In my opinion the best package able to export and embed a 3D model in a website are the products by Hypercosm. Not only can you view and rotate a model or scene, but you can also interact with it as if it were real. For instance, for your embedded 3D model you have the ability to markup and annotate, use custom user interfaces (skins), make custom section planes and cuts, and the ability to online collaborate. Moreover, by adding a bit of javascript (using the open javascript API) and html you are able to add markers and hyperlinks just like the tools in Google Maps.

I've added a small demo (should work fine in IE, Firefox and Safari) to show a couple aspects of this wonderful piece of software. You need the hypercosm player (sorry windows only) which is similar to the flash player but with 3D capabilities.