For the past few months, Stamen Design has been working with 3-D data from Nokia’s Here. Something pretty came out of the experiment.
For your viewing, embedding, linking, and otherwise internet-ing pleasure: http://here.stamen.com/ is live today. It uses 3D data from HERE for San Francisco, New York, London, and Berlin to create city-wide 3D browsable maps, and it does this in the browser (though you’ll need a WebGL-enabled browser to see it). As in many of our other mapping projects, the urls change dynamically depending on location and other factors, and the data conforms, more or less, to the Tile Map Service specification. What this means, among other things, is that it’s not only possible to link to and embed these maps at specific locations and zoom levels, but that it’s easy—and as we’ve seen with Citytracking, easy is good.
There are a bunch of views to play with, and you should try all of them. My favorites though are the city-planning look in Pinstripe and the glowing aesthetic of the height view.
