Aidan Chopra, SketchUp Evangelist and John Bacus, the Product Manager for SketchUp, were invited to the Materialise World Conference 2010 in Belgium to give a keynote speech. Unfortunately, the erupting Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland prevented them from getting there. Instead, they made a great presentation which was shown at the conference.
"Everyone agrees that the future of visualization is 3D -- there's simply no better way to communicate spatial information than spatially. Democratic tools like SketchUp and Google Earth are helping laypeople to understand this, but 3D remains a challenging hurdle for most. The difficulty lies on two fronts: the creation of 3D content and the means by which we interact with it. Making a model and showing it off should be as easy as taking a picture and passing it around. What do we need to do to make 3D as ubiquitous as other forms of media?"