Google Building Maker

» see sketchup.google.com/3dwh/buildingmaker.html as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

For about four years the tall buildings in Google Earth were made by hand. Not by Google. By people sitting at home, dragging simple boxes around inside a browser until the shapes lined up with aerial photographs, then submitting the result and waiting to see whether it got accepted.

Building Maker opened on 14 october 2009. You picked a city from a list that grew to at least 127 of them, then picked a building nobody had done yet. The screen gave you the same rooftop from several different overhead angles. Your job was to push a cube or a wedge into position against one photo, then check it against the others until the thing agreed with reality from every direction. The software worked out the geometry from your alignments and pulled the wall textures straight off the photographs, so a decent model of an office block took a few minutes rather than an evening. Finished work went to the 3D Warehouse and then through review, and whatever survived that appeared in the 3D Buildings layer for everyone. Anyone who wanted more control could pull the model into SketchUp and keep going.

Google announced the retirement on 13 march 2013 in one of its spring cleaning posts, without saying much about why. The stated end date was 1 june and the tool actually went dark on the fourth. The reason was already public: on 6 june 2012 Google had shown automatically generated 3D imagery built by photogrammetry from aerial photos, covering whole cities at once with no human in the process. From 1 october 2013 Google Earth stopped using the volunteer models at all.

I was on the consumer end of this, like almost everybody. The first thing anyone did after installing Google Earth was fly to their own street and look at the roof of their own building, and after that you went looking for the skylines that had been built out. It never occurred to me that those towers had authors. They read as data, as something the satellites had simply brought back, and it took the shutdown notice years later for me to understand that a person somewhere had lined up a box against a photograph of a building in a city I was looking at from Ankara.

~ the dossier ~

~ who did the work ~

Google bought SketchUp in 2006 from a company called @Last Software, and the strategy behind that purchase was visible almost immediately. Give people a free modeling tool that is genuinely pleasant to use along with somewhere to put the results, and the world gets modeled by enthusiasts at no cost. Building Maker was the last and lowest-effort step in that funnel, stripped down until anyone with a mouse could contribute in five minutes.

It worked. Cities filled in. Hobbyists adopted their own neighborhoods and modeled every structure on the block, and there were people who put hundreds of buildings into Earth over those years for no compensation beyond seeing their work show up in a product that hundreds of millions of people used. The compensation was real, in its way. Then it was withdrawn.

~ the model queue ~

The review step is the part that gets forgotten. Not everything submitted went live. Models were checked for quality before they entered the Buildings layer, which meant somebody at Google was maintaining a moderation pipeline for volunteer geometry, and it meant the volunteers were working to a standard set by someone else.

That arrangement produced a strange kind of labor. Unpaid, but supervised. Optional, but graded. It is the same deal that mapping projects and reference wikis run on, except those hand the corpus back to the people who built it under a license. Building Maker's output lived in Google's product on Google's terms, and when Google no longer wanted it there was no version of the layer for anybody else to keep running.

~ the automated version ~

Photogrammetry beat the volunteers on every axis that a company measures. It covered entire metropolitan areas in one pass, and it caught the trees and bridges and messy shapes that boxes had always been bad at. It also never got bored. Set against a system that took four years to model a couple of hundred cities incompletely, it was not a contest.

What the automated version does not do is care which buildings matter. A volunteer models their own school, or the strange 1970s tower that everyone in town has an opinion about. That is a set of choices, and the choices carried information about the place. Photogrammetry captures everything at uniform indifference, which is better data and a thinner record.

~ the photographs ~

Google ran the same play more than once and closed it the same way more than once. Panoramio gathered geotagged photographs from users and threaded them through Google Earth and Maps for a decade before being shut in 2016 and largely discarded. Building Maker gathered geometry. Both were built on the assumption that people would happily do detailed work for a platform in exchange for visibility.

Both assumptions held, which is the uncomfortable part. The volunteers showed up and did years of it. What neither project could survive was the arrival of a machine that produced adequate output at scale, at which point the human contributions were not deprecated so much as deleted. If you built a tower in Google Earth in 2010, it is not sitting in an archive somewhere. It is gone, and the building on your screen today was assembled by an algorithm from photographs taken from an airplane.

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