Tour the March Madness arenas in 3D

Hello college basketball fans! It’s March and that means March Madness is in full swing. 65 teams were pitted against each other in this single elimination tournament to decide the 2010 NCAA Men's College Basketball Championship. In getting into the spirit of the season, Google launched a College Basketball webpage to see the latest results, get live information on teams, manage your bracket, and tour 3D models of the arenas.

Here at the SketchUp office, we gathered 14 models of the arenas and added them to a Featured Collection. These models are located all over the country, and largely created by users like you. Especially cool is the model of the Energy Solutions Arena in Salt Lake City, where you can fly inside and see the interior of the model! Both the Edward Jones Dome and the HSBC Arena are great examples of high quality photo-texturing, and the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis was created using Google Building Maker.

We also put together a 3D tour (kml file) of these arenas for Google Earth 5. You can see the relation of the cities to one another and explore the surrounding 3D models. Creating a tour like this is a snap with the touring feature in Google Earth 5.



So explore the collection, enjoy the tour and hopefully rejoice in how well your bracket still looks.

Posted by Adam Hecht, 3D Data Specialist