From 24th to 28th August 2009 the International Cartographic Association (ICA) held its first international symposium on ‘True-3D in Cartography', intended as a multi-Commission meeting, in Dresden, Germany. Supported by the European Chapter of the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE Europe), the event was organised by the German Cartographic Society (DGfK) on behalf of ICA. The initiator and chairman of the symposium, Professor Manfred Buchroithner, director of the Institute for Cartography at TU Dresden, was able to welcome a total of 91 attendees from 22 countries and all continents, both experts and those interested in applying the new technologies presented.

Visualisation
The symposium was opened by Prof. Harold Moellering from Ohio State University on behalf of ICA president Prof. William Cartwright. Professor Moellering also presented the keynote address ‘Perspectives on 3D Visualisation of Spatial Geodata and Future Prospects', putting past, recent and possible future developments into a historical context. The event objectives were also strongly supported by the Visualisation Group of TU Dresden's Centre for Information Services and High Performance Computing (through Dr Bernd Hetze), which presented various aspects of (auto-) stereoscopic and steric geodata visualisation.

Session Topics
In the space of four days participants attended 32 presentations covering the whole spectrum of true-3D, up to the most recent developments in stereo web cartography. Ten sessions dealt with topics such as Flat Auto-Stereoscopic Hardcopies and Screens, Data and Techniques for True-3D Geovisualisation, Globes, True-3D in Geophysics and Geology, True-3D for Urban and Rural Landscape Visualisation, Non-Planar Optical Projections, Topographic and Thematic Geovisualisation Go True-3D, and Tactile Maps. Invited presentations were given by Wolf-Dieter Rase on Creating Physical 3D Maps Using Rapid Prototyping Techniques, Toni Mair on Handmade Geomodels: Revival of an Ancient Art or Outdated Technology?, Andreas Riedl on State-of-the-Art of Tactile Hyperglobes, and finally by Gunter Weiss, vice-president of the International Society for Geometry and Graphics (ISGG), who addressed the question of How True is True-3D? - Geometry between Single Image Stereograms and Lenticular Foils.

Demonstrations
Completing the symposium were three scientific-technical excursions to places of particular interest in Dresden, and a commercial and scientific exhibition with exhibitors from Europe and European representatives of American companies who demonstrated their installations. Among the most acclaimed demonstrations was one by Wolfgang Pusch and Toni Mair, the latter probably being the leading living landscape sculptor in the world. This session, entitled ‘The Art of Manually Producing Landscape Models', was more like a workshop, proving the goal of the symposium chairman has been reached: to trigger a sort of revival of this classical art form. The spontaneous idea to follow up this symposium with another was enthusiastically embraced by our Spanish colleagues, who volunteered to organise the second ICA Symposium on this dynamically developing topic in 2011.

The ICA Working Group on Use and User Issues linked their participation at the Symposium with a Group Meeting at TU Dresden.

A volume of abstracts is currently available online, accessed via the homepage of the Dresden Institute for Cartography (WEB1). By the middle of 2010 the symposium proceedings will be published in book form as Springer Lecture Notes on Geoinformation and Cartography (LNGC).