Mad with power, researcher and Minecraft fan creates a way to voxelize the whole world

A researcher has constructed a pipeline of instruments to show considered one of Google Maps’ 3D tiles right into a world of voxels in Minecraft, with the end result being a surprisingly good wanting and simply deeply spectacular course of that spits out voxelized variations of the earth. Created by graduate pupil Ryan Hardesty Lewis at Cornell Tech in New York, the Voxel Earth method spits out voxels that may be exported to Minecraft, a browser, or no matter it’s you wish to see a little bit of voxelized Earth.

“The pipeline we developed begins with Google’s high-resolution 3D Tiles, that are then decomposed into voxels, assigned colours and textures, and exported,” Lewis instructed SIGGRAPH. “We use an algorithm to assign colour and materials properties based mostly on the unique photogrammetry knowledge, which makes the world vastly extra recognizable, relatively than being a bit of greater than colorless blocks in town-like shapes.”

That is the fundamentals, which appears pretty simple, proper? Match colours, make voxels. It is the subsequent half that makes it spectacular—to me, at the very least.

“We additionally design an [machine learning] algorithm that then maps these voxels to Minecraft blocks, all of the whereas preserving the environmental context and performance inside the recreation,” stated Lewis. “For instance, water blocks signifying a river would possibly usually be simply blue voxels, however we will do issues like acknowledge the elevation and extent to say it’s a river or ocean, and substitute it with a water block as an alternative in a Minecraft illustration.”

Lewis says he hopes it may be utilized by educators to show maps into dynamic classes in fields like geography, environmental science, and concrete planning. He is additionally positive that avid gamers will get pleasure from utilizing it to mess around with real-world areas.

Lewis will current a paper about his method on the upcoming SIGGRAPH convention, a specialist computing group devoted to the research of laptop graphics. PC Gamer has beforehand lined some wondrous graphics and simulation improvements out of SIGGRAPH—just like the eye-popping glory of placing on socks.

You’ll be able to learn a full interview with Lewis on SIGGRAPH’s web site, and you may try extra particulars and gifs of the mission in motion on voxelearth.org. These business professionals fortunate sufficient to attend SIGGRAPH will be capable of go see Voxelizing Google Earth and mess around with it subsequent month.

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