Step aside, Google Maps; stand down, Apple Maps. Researchers from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in Germany have created a new online atlas that shows the location of 2.75 billion buildings in 3D.

It's a phenomenal technical achievement, and it was made possible by a vast database of satellite imagery and some clever machine-learning algorithms , using height data from buildings that have been measured to estimate the sizes of buildings that haven't.

The map is called the GlobalBuildingAtlas, and you can access it online now . Compared to previous databases of this type, such as the Microsoft Building Footprint database, it offers information on more than a billion extra buildings, with relatively high-resolution 3D models for almost all of the structures too.

Now that

See Full Page