The most realistic re-rendering of Google Earth city/buildings data yet comes from Zetterstrom, posted to the SourceForge forums:

this is very very cool; I am hoping that we get some more really nice looking cityscape stuff. All these nice re-renderings only give more more incentive to add texture-capture to OGLE so that the same can be done for video game characters.

Good thoughts from SecondLife's VP of Product Development:
OpenGL, Copying, and Stealing.

Last night, I did a SecondLife Future Salon about OGLE. What a wierd experience, presenting to a bunch of people in a video game. You can see my slides here if you want.

People seemed to be into the possibilities presented by OGLE, and were appreciative of the presentation, which is always nice. Of course I OGLE'd the 'moment', so here is an in-game pic, and a Maya rendering:

I just established the ogle-3d tag on Flickr for people to post cool photos/pics/renders of things they have done with OGLE. Do it up!

Another sweet use of OGLE, posted semi-anonymously to the forums. Someone named Karl out there has used it to capture a molecular model that they made using the open-source molecular modelling tool PyMol, and then texture, light, and re-render using Lightwave. Looks great if you ask me:

SourceForge user cad_junkie wants to do some 3D printing for people who can give him cool 3D models:

https://sourceforge.net/forum/message.php?msg_id=3581928

hit him up!

Over the last 2 weeks or so, I worked with Jerry Paffendorf of Electric Sheep and SecondLife future salons to capture and 3D print his SecondLife avatar, with his SecondLife 'Slegway.'

We had some success after a couple iterations, learning a good lesson about what you just can't do on a standard 3D printer. The one-piece print would have been just impossible to separate from the support material without destroying the model material, eh?

The OGLE capture in Maya
3D printed as one piece	(side view)
Avatar and Slegway printed separately	Standing on the vehicle
The free and Han-solo versions next to each other

Today Theo Watson in the Eyebeam Production Studio released the Maya to Google Earth plugin.

Maya2GoogleEarth is an open-source, cross-platform tool developed at Eyebeam for exporting 3D models from Maya into Google Earth. Once installed, it allows you to export 3D models from within your scene as a single Google Earth Placemark (KML) file.

The project was inspired by the Open GL extraction utility OGLE which can extract 3D data from openGL programs like Google Earth. We thought that it would be fun to be able to take the extracted 3D data, remix and add to it and then load it back into Google Earth.

Here are a couple examples, and there are more (as well as the KML files for download) on the Maya2GEarth page:

Check it out folks, someone posted this anonymously to the SourceForge forums -- a re-render of Google Earth building data, but with texture maps!

(click for full-size image)

More from CSven at the reBlang blog on what to do with OGLE data from SecondLife.

Discussion on cleaning up the capture of your Avatar for 3D printing:

Discusson on objects modelled within SecondLife and captured with OGLE:

Over at the blog Zoopus, fookr has posted a positively wacky example and tutorial on using OGLE. His language is bizarre, but his info is right on. He demonstrates a couple of uses, gives a tutorial on how to install and use, and even lists a number of tools for cleaning up the 3D data it exports. check it out: http://www.zoopus.com/?p=24.

Posted anonymously on the OGLE forums, sweet re-render of some NYC building data:

Over on 3dtest, they've posted a nice, succinct interview about OGLE: http://www.3d-test.com/interviews/OGLE_1.htm

There is a pretty good discussion of the copyright issues around the OGLE project over on reBang: http://blog.rebang.com/?p=616#comments

With all the cool feedback, links, and applications people are sending in about OGLE, I've decided we need to launch a lo-key blog for the site. This way its really easy to post things related to the project whenever they come rolling in. You may note that there are a number of posts from before this blog launched -- I went ahead and put in content dated for when it would have been posted had we already had the blog.