Company creates 3D online map of campus

With the UCF campus rapidly growing over time, two attending upperclassmen and their company are looking to give other students a new perspective.

Chris Sardinas, a UCF senior digital media major, and Robert Stephens, a UCF junior information technology major, are putting together a 3D map of the UCF campus on Google Earth as part of a larger map, which is to be submitted in the 2012 Google Model Your Town Competition.

The competition, which features entries from around the world, asks competitors to depict their communities through digital design on Google Earth. The entries are then voted for by the public and the winning map wins $25,000, which goes to the town's public school district.

The submission by Sardinas and Stephens, which must be entered by March 1, features the UCF campus, the Alafaya corridor and downtown Orlando.

Stephens, who takes photographs of the buildings to be used by Sardinas in modeling the buildings, feels that putting the map together is all for a good cause.

"Our main point of doing this was for the community. It's a $25,000 grand prize to give to the school district of your choice, so it would be Orange County public schools," Stephens said. "That would be a great thing to have happen."

In addition to winning money for their own school district, the partners also hope to gain exposure for their company, CS3Design, which offers advertising opportunities by modeling businesses in Google Earth.

Founded by Sardinas in April 2011, the company has had roughly 20 clients ranging from individual architects to lawyers, all looking to advertise through 3D properties on Google Earth.

Before establishing his company in 2011, Sardinas also came just short of winning the Google Model Your Town Competition in 2010, ranking second place in the world with his map depicting parts of West Palm Beach.

Though Sardinas and Stephens originally created a virtual model of UCF as a submission for this year's competition, they hope to eventually sell the map to UCF and be paid to maintain it live for a set period of time.

Sardinas, who handles the actual modeling of the buildings through the program Google SketchUp, said that UCF has not shown much interest in a 3D map. However, he is still confident that a map like this will benefit students.

"They'd be able to see their campus from a new perspective, because not every student has a helicopter that flies around the school seeing all the different areas. So this would give students a new chance to see a different view of their campus," Sardinas said. "I lived here for four years on campus. You get used to it; this would kind of bring it to life again."

When asked about how useful a 3D map of the UCF campus would be, Jillian Blueford, a UCF junior psychology major and campus tour guide, felt that a 3D map would make things much easier for potential students.

"That would be really helpful, because there are some buildings that we don't take them inside or they can only see from a distance. So it would be cool if they could actually see it," said Blueford, who has been a tour guide since the summer of 2011. "There are a couple stops where we point out buildings that they don't see at all, so that would be convenient."

Blueford also said that a 3D map would also be helpful on rainy day tours, where tour guides only show a slide show of the buildings and have the visitors go out with maps on their own.

Christopher Delange, a senior at Jupiter High School touring the UCF campus, also felt that a 3D map would be very useful for navigating around campus.

"The execution would probably be quite difficult I can imagine, quite a big map," said Delange, who was recently accepted to UCF and plans on studying in the medical field. "But yeah, seeing the texture of the buildings and the direction of the building itself would be quite useful to know in relevance to where you are."

Though UCF has not shown a great interest in the 3D map yet, Stephens hopes that winning the 2012 Google Model Your Town Competition will showcase how practical the map can be.

"Hopefully whenever this comes out, and maybe if we do perhaps happen to win, then maybe they would see how great it could be for the school. Of course, we'd like to earn a little bit of money for it," Stephens said. "But it's not really about the money, it's just us doing it for our city. If we could win that $25,000 for Orange County, that would be awesome."

Voting for the 2012 Google Model Your Town Competition will be open to the public from April 1 through May 1. To learn more about CS3Design, visit www.cs3design.com.