Stanford took top honors earlier this month in Google’s SketchUp contest, in which teams of competitors from different schools designed 3-D models of their respective campuses. Led by Steven Lehrburger ‘07 and Joseph Bergen ‘07, Stanford’s team emerged in the top seven out of 364 other schools registered for the contest.

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Google Earth users can now see Stanford’s campus in 3-D, thanks to the efforts of a student design team that banded together after forming a student initiated course. The group will proceed to the next round of competition, which will be held in Mountain View from Aug. 6-9. #gallery http://daily.stanford.org/image/full/7771
Google Earth

Google Earth users can now see Stanford’s campus in 3-D, thanks to the efforts of a student design team that banded together after forming a student initiated course. The group will proceed to the next round of competition, which will be held in Mountain View from Aug. 6-9.

The Stanford team’s contest entry is visible to the public on the 3-D Buildings layer of Google Earth, which, according to Lehrburger, “feels pretty cool.”

The winning teams will travel to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View from Aug. 6-9. All expenses will be paid for by Google, including airfare, transportation via limousine and hotel accommodation.

“This isn’t as exciting as it might be for an east coast school since it is only 15 minutes away,” said Lehrburger, “but it is still pretty cool.”

He noted that Google will even be paying for one of his team members to fly back to Mountain View from China.

Lehrburger and Bergen, both Architectural Design majors, worked closely with John Barton, a lecturer in Architectural Design at the University, to design a Student Initiated Course (SIC) that would double as Stanford’s team for the SketchUp contest. The course was called “Putting Stanford on the Map.”

“The [SIC] program seemed like it would provide a good framework for organizing the project and motivating students to stay involved,” Lehrburger said.

“It seemed that the [SIC] route made sense to make [the project] attractive to students already on a busy schedule,” Bergen added.

Lehrburger said that he and Bergen worked to comprise a team of both Architectural Design majors and those outside the field.

“Joseph and I selected students for the class with a short questionnaire, and we made selections based off of past experience, interest in the subject and other time commitments,” Lehrburger said. “It took a lot of planning, coordination, and dedication as well as many emails to get everything done.”

According to Bergen, the team took thousands of photographs of campus buildings before setting out to model them in 3-D.

The Stanford team joins six other schools that excelled in the SketchUp contest: Purdue University, Concordia University, Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, Dartmouth College and the University of Minnesota.