Apple acquired mind-blowing 3D mapping company C3 Technologies
I currently work for Yell Labs in the UK (though quit last week to fully commit to the startup I'm working on with 2 other great guys), and we use C3 on the maps part of the main website.<p>If you want to see what it looks like, try this:
<a href="http://www.yell.com/map/" rel="nofollow">http://www.yell.com/map/</a><p>Only a few locations in the UK were commissioned... the cost is high so we aimed at the large cities to start with. It's really good stuff so long as you stay away from trees that are near buildings ;)<p>The dataset is enormous though. Going to be interesting to see that go mobile.<p>C3 basically took a FPS game map approach (poly data and textures) and overlaid that with a tiled map approach. So each tile downloads the poly and then lays the texture for that tile over the poly.