[btown]

Their landing page and interaction model doesn't do their technology justice.

Take a look here: https://www.melown.com/intergeo2016/?pos=obj,10.740010,47.24... - you can drag around, and drag the edge of the compass disk to rotate the camera.

From this press release https://www.melown.com/blog/official-launch.html - it seems that 3D exploration in-browser is only part of their innovation; the other is the ability to create detailed 3D maps of entire cities simply from simultaneous-localization-and-mapping of aerial imagery feeds.

I'm not sure if Google's been able to do something similar, but I recall at one point that in order for buildings to appear as 3D in Google Maps/Earth, they'd need to be added manually by the community in their 3D editor. There are certainly glitches, and it's hard to know how much manual cleanup was required for these examples, but it's clear that not every building here was manually modeled. Regardless, it's quite an accomplishment to be able to do this type of thing from photographic data alone.

[bri3d]

Google have used photogrammetry to produce 3D meshes for Earth/Maps since 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6Douyfa7l8

They also use LIDAR data from street view to provide 3D data when you're in that mode as well.

[btown]

That's awesome! I stand corrected.