How to See Your Own House in 3D

Finding it, tilting it, and why the roof sometimes looks like it was modelled in clay.

It is the first thing almost everyone does with a mapping app, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise. You type your own address, tilt the view, and look at your own roof. Then you look at your parents' house, the school you went to, and the flat you lived in when you were twenty.

Here is how to get the best version of that, and what the imagery can and cannot show you.

Finding it

Type the full address into the search bar, including the postcode. Partial addresses land you on the right street and the wrong end of it, which is a surprisingly common source of confusion — people conclude the imagery is wrong when they are simply looking at the wrong building.

Once you are on the street, switch to 3D and tilt. The gesture is two fingers dragged upward, which drops the camera from directly overhead towards the horizon. That tilt is what turns a floor plan into a place.

Then rotate. Two fingers turned around each other spins the view, and rotating a building through a full circle is the fastest way to understand its shape.

Why your house may look strange

Three-dimensional buildings are constructed from aerial photographs taken from several angles, and the process has predictable weaknesses.

Thin things melt. Railings, aerials, washing lines and thin chimneys often come out as blobs or vanish entirely, because there is not enough of them in the source photographs.

Trees are the worst offenders. A tree beside a house frequently ends up merged with it, so your roof appears to have a green growth attached.

Edges soften. Sharp corners come out slightly rounded, which is why 3D buildings often look as though they have been modelled in clay.

Newer buildings may be missing. If the aerial capture predates construction, the site is a hole or an empty plot.

None of this means the imagery is faulty. It means you are looking at a reconstruction rather than a photograph.

The street-level version

3D gives you the shape; Street View gives you the texture. Drop to the street outside your own address and you get the door, the brickwork, the state of the hedge, and whatever was parked outside on the day.

The step people miss is moving. Advance a few panoramas up the street and back down it, and you get the view a person walking past actually has, which is different from the head-on shot.

Where to look after your own address

The list everyone works through, roughly in order, and a few that are better than the obvious ones.

The house before this one. More interesting than your current address, because you already know what that looks like from the outside.

Your school. Playgrounds and sports fields read particularly well from above, and the scale is almost always wrong in memory — everything is smaller than you remember.

A route you used to walk daily. Follow it panorama by panorama. This is the one that tends to surprise people, because a walk you did a thousand times exists in your head as a sequence of moments rather than a continuous street.

The place a photograph was taken. Find a family picture with any identifiable background and go and stand there. Matching the angle is oddly satisfying.

Somewhere from a book or a film. Fictional addresses often have real streets behind them, and standing on one is a different experience from reading about it.

The thing it is genuinely useful for

Beyond the ten minutes of looking at your own roof, this has a real use: seeing somewhere you cannot get to.

A house you grew up in on another continent. A grandparent's village. A street you have heard about your whole life and never visited. People use mapping apps for this constantly and rarely say so, and it is probably the most valuable thing the technology does.

Because the imagery is historical, it is sometimes closer to what you remember than the real place would be now.

Questions people ask

Can I get my house removed or blurred?

Not through this app. Imagery is supplied by mapping providers, and requests to blur a property go to whoever captured it — there is usually a reporting option in the provider's own tools.

Why is my street missing in 3D?

Detailed 3D building models exist for cities and large towns, and thin out quickly in rural areas. Where they are absent, you get satellite imagery draped over terrain instead, which is still useful and much flatter.

How old is the imagery?

It varies by place, from months to several years. Dense cities are recaptured more often than quiet ones.

Does it work on iPad?

Yes, and the tilt and rotate gestures are considerably easier on a larger screen.

Look up your first address rather than your current one. That is the one worth the ten minutes.