Brian McClendon, director of engineering for Google Earth, demonstrates the virtual glimpses provided by the software he works on Friday at the Lied Center during the KU Engineering Expo. McClendon, a 1986 KU graduate, was the keynote speaker for the expo and addressed a crowd of about 1,000 people while he showed the audience a 3-D version of his house in California.

Southwest Junior High students, Bailey Frei, 13, left, and Shelly Cluff, 13, try taping 85 pound Anna Koppes, 12, to the wall Friday for an experiment at the KU Engineering Expo in Learned Hall. At the expo, area students of all grades compete in various contests that include designing a Rube Goldberg contraption and a bridge made out of pasta.

Kansas University graduate Brian McClendon is an executive at one of the world’s hottest companies.

But even better than that, he owns a spacious home in the California hills – and he drew applause by giving people a virtual glimpse of it Friday during a speech at the Lied Center.

“That guy’s got a sweet pad!” one young man in the audience said when McClendon zoomed in on a 3-D model of his home using the software program Google Earth, which gives users a clickable, satellite’s-eye view of the world and allows users to add 3-D versions of buildings.

McClendon, who grew up in Lawrence and graduated from KU in 1986, is the director of engineering for Google Earth. He spoke to a crowd of close to 1,000 people who came to campus for the KU Engineering Expo, an event that’s been held on campus since 1911 to show young people what’s possible in the world of engineering.

“Engineers dream and then bring those dreams to life,” KU engineering dean Stuart Bell told the crowd.

A popular part of the expo each year is the contests, in which high school, junior high and elementary students compete to design bridges with pasta, make chemical-reaction volcanoes, or design a structure that will protect an egg when it’s dropped, to name a few.

Students also get an opportunity to see what KU engineering students are working on, whether it’s video games or technology to monitor ice sheets. A jet engine sitting on the Learned Hall lawn got some use Friday, KU School of Engineering spokeswoman Jill Hummels said.

“Over the lunch hour, I heard that they were roasting hot dogs on that, which I understand cooked up pretty fast,” she said.

McClendon took the audience through his career path and gave them a glimpse of some of the things that can be done with Google Earth, such as viewing a 3-D model of the Eiffel Tower and watching real-time data about airplanes taking off from the Amsterdam airport. So far, Google Earth has been installed by 200 million people worldwide, he said, and more and more people are mapping 3-D images of their own buildings.

“Over time, we’ll have, hopefully, a completely modeled Earth,” he said. “It will take a while, but there are a lot of people and there’s a lot of interest in doing it.”

The expo continues from 9 a.m. to noon today in Eaton and Learned halls and is open to the public.